Wikidata:WikiProject Städel Museum Wikidata Clean-Up

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Project Background

The Städel Museum collection spans 700 years of art. More than 24.000 of these works of art are in the public domain (i.e., works of art no longer under copyright protection), digitised, and available for download free of charge via the Digital Collection. These digital surrogates (and their metadata) are in the public domain and may be downloaded, edited, remixed, shared, reproduced in any format, and used for any purpose. The aim of this service is to make the Städel Museum’s collection available to the public and to promote the public enjoyment of shared cultural assets. With that in mind we are thrilled that, in the years since we first openly licensed our collection, the wikimedia community has embraced our offer and uploaded our data to both wikimedia commons and wikidata, with images being used across multiple Wikipedias and beyond. However, over time, some of this data has changed: we have released higher resolution images, we’ve improved the quality of our metadata etc. We want to explore how our institution can become part of the wikimedia community, taking responsibility for maintaining data quality where appropriate.

Pilot Project Städel Museum Wikidata Clean-Up

In dialogue with Wikimedia Deutschland, we are planning to carry out a publicly documented “wikidata clean-up” of a set of highlight works from our collection. We recognise the tremendous value of wikidata as a platform for open collaboration around these artworks, bringing together multiple sources and perspectives. At the same time, as owners of the physical artworks, actively researching the collection, there are certain properties (like those describing physical nature of the works) where we can be sure we provide the most accurate data. We want to explore our role as commoners and collaborators to improve the quality of this information on wikidata. Which artworks: The works selected are the highlight artworks included in the publication Städel Museum: 700 Jahre Kunst. Auf die Hand. Wienand Verlag, Köln. 2018, with the exception of the works from the Contemporary Art Collection.

What we plan to do

• For statements where Städel Museum is cited as the source of the data - update reference urls from search string to PID, update values as needed
• For properties where we are certain we can vouch for the most accurate data, we will remove inaccurate statements. We will not remove statements citing valid alternative or historical sources.
• Where no data exists for the artworks we will model them in wikidata from scratch.
• We will report back here with an overview of the kinds of edits we have made. We welcome all feedback and suggestions from the community about our project on the talk page.

Timeline

December 2023: Preparation and communication of the project
1 and 2 February 2023: Clean-Up sprint
March 2024: Wrap-up

Participants

• Städel Museum - operated by Romy Kahler (Online Communication)
  
• Ulrike Fladerer (Digital Collection)

Resources, Licences and Disclaimer

We appreciate users taking this project as an opportunity to examine and update further works from the Städel Collection.

Please note: The upload and cleanup phase took place between 1 February and 16 February 2024. More recently updated data may be found in the Digital Collection of the Städel at any time and accessed via the OAI API of the Städel Museum.

The Städel Museum uses an OAI (Open Archives Initiative) API for data interchange and synchronisation. The metadata is regularly updated and can be viewed or harvested. The interface features two different metadata formats: firstly, a significantly reduced compressed format to assist in identifying the objects via Dublin Core, and secondly LIDO (Lightweight Information Describing Objects) for descriptive metadata. The metadata is available under the licence CC0 1.0.