Description
Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections (NUASC), working in collaboration with Northeastern’s Digital Scholarship Group and the Boston Resource Center (BRC), embarked on a project in fall 2021 to represent archival collections, their creators, and related subjects and individuals in Wikidata. Initially, NUASC assistant archivists created sixteen Wikidata items of individuals, organizations, and other notable subjects based on the finding aids of four archival collections relating to Boston’s Asian-American community, focusing on collections relevant to the BRC’s project to survey historical collections related to Boston’s Chinatown community. After reconsideration of the data gathered in this early stage, we have expanded the scope to focus on additional Boston neighborhoods and collections related to activists and community organizations in Roxbury, the South End, and East Boston, and have begun to track the growing data points in WikiProject Northeastern University Library. With the goal of creating greater exposure for and findability of NUASC’s collections representing historically marginalized neighborhoods in Boston, the project’s use of Wikidata has raised important questions around how archives can contribute to Wikidata, as well as how Wikidata can serve potential archives users. We as NUASC staff reflect upon our work completed so far, the opportunities and challenges posed by using Wikidata to aggregate and organize this information for further use, to consider how this project has fit into our workflows, and to consider how the data we have collected may be utilized to serve researchers as the project progresses.