Sara Ring, continuing education librarian at Minitex (a joint program of the Minnesota Office of Higher Education and the University of Minnesota), was named a 2024 Library Journal Mover & Shaker for her work helping develop 23 Linked Data Things and the Minitex Wikimedia Project. We recently spoke with Ring about what it took to build those projects and her plans for the future.

LJ: How did 23 Linked Data Things come about?

Sara Ring: It started with a group of myself at Minitex, colleagues from other academic institutions in Minnesota, and also someone from Illinois. We started off with monthly meetings and called ourselves the Wikidata Book Club because we’d all attended a webinar about Wikidata and wanted to learn more about that platform. We were interested in how it applied to libraries—we were seeing lots of people putting library information into Wikidata. But our conversation soon turned to discussing this broader topic of linked data and the lack of practical learning resources. We also talked about how it can be difficult to keep up with all the developments with metadata in the library community, especially if you don’t see the immediate benefit of how it’s applicable to the work you’re doing.

We decided to develop the 23 Linked Data Things as a way for library staff, wherever they were, to explore and learn at their own pace. Each of the 23 things is a web page, and it has viewers go through readings and activities. They don’t have to go in order from 1 to 23. They don’t have to do them all. They can pick and choose. We wanted that flexible model. It’s the genesis for why we wanted to offer this to the library community, because we were struggling with it ourselves.

How long did it take to complete 23 Linked Data Things?

There were five of us that met monthly and did all the planning. We took a year and a half to write all the content, but we published them incrementally. As soon as one was done and we’d edited each other’s, then we would publish. The last one was published in the fall of 2023.

Can you share some stats of usage?

We’ve had over 35,000 page views of the content since we launched in 2022. There’s been a little bit of a dip since launch, but we still see people consistently looking at the content. Looking at where the traffic comes from, there are viewers from Minnesota, of course, but also California, Virginia, and New York. Some of the top places for people viewing the content are the UK, Canada, Australia, Taiwan, and Germany.

We didn’t expect people to finish every activity. We offered a certificate for each activity that viewers could request when they’d completed it. About 300 people have requested a certificate, but it’s probably [been done by] more than that because the certificate is optional.

We’ve had three people do all 23 activities. Each takes 45 to 60 minutes to complete, so that’s 23 hours or so, maybe more. We also offered a public comment feature so we could receive feedback. One library shared at the end that they were doing it as a group, and when they finished the activities they wanted, they had an ice cream party. They shared some funny linked data–themed ice cream flavors. We got a kick out of reading the list, which were things like Predicate Pistachio, a nutty pistachio flavor that predicates your love for unique tastes. There was also the RDF Ripple, a rich vanilla ice cream with a swirl of raspberry, referencing the research Resource Description Framework.

What are your plans for the project going forward?

It’s been a little over a year since we published the final activity. The main authors will start meeting again this year. We set a goal to update all the things on a yearly basis to keep the content fresh and make sure the links still work.

Also, not the original authors of the project, but Minitex, will be offering a Linked Data course that will be free and open to anybody. We’ll likely incorporate some of the 23 Linked Data Things into it. But it will be a live course.

How was 23 Linked Things Data connected to the Minitex Wikimedia Project?

A couple of the 23 Linked Things covered how you can explore Wikimedia platforms to learn about and use linked data. This was all swirling in my head while we were writing 23 Things. I thought, maybe we could consider doing a pilot where we can learn more about the different Wikimedia platforms that library staff could use for creating linked data. I knew that Wikidata is connected to digital objects stored in another Wikimedia project, Wikimedia Commons. There were other organizations in the library community doing projects like the pilot we developed. We started our own pilot project with two libraries and one county historical society. Our goals were to learn more about these tools, to learn more about the structured data side of Wikimedia Commons.

Another piece of that project was working with those three organizations to have them upload their content to Wikimedia Commons and then connect it to relevant Wikipedia articles. We were able to enhance a Wikipedia page that might not have had an image of the person the article was about, and now suddenly it does, because the library uploaded that image.

There’s a lot that libraries and cultural heritage organizations have that’s unique. If they’re able to share it in a platform like that, it’s not just better access to their information, but it also allows others in the world to use that content and add that content to Wikipedia articles they’re working on.

What did you learn from that project?

We wanted to learn about the structured data side where you can add Wikidata, like identifiers, and how the linked data stuff comes in. We wanted to see how that works and how it provides better discoverability.

With the pilot, it succeeded in that we found the content to be a lot more discoverable once it was in those platforms, a lot more discoverable to search engines and to users who may start their search on the web versus going to the digital collection that lives at X and Y organizations.

We knew this was a worthy project, so last year we started working with the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) to join their Wikimedia pipeline project, which they’d been doing since 2020. Because Minitex runs the Minnesota Digital Library, we’re a DPLA hub and already contribute our metadata to DPLA. Because of that existing relationship, we could work with DPLA staff, and we joined up with 12 libraries and other cultural heritage organizations that opted into another project that was uploading images from their digital collections. We’re talking about things where copyright had expired. DPLA did the heavy lift of uploading those images to Wikimedia Commons. Then Minitex, along with DPLA, trained that new cohort of 12 organizations on Wikipedia editing. We asked them to just try to make at least five to 10 enhancements to existing Wikipedia articles.

We’re just wrapping that up now, so we’ll have more outcomes to study. We’ll talk about the future of that project and if people want to continue as a cohort and just continue learning about the Wikimedia platforms. Or there may be an opportunity to have more organizations opt in, because through Minitex and the Minnesota Digital Library, we work with more than 200 organizations in Minnesota. There’s definitely room to grow the project, if people are interested. We may even try to organize some public Wikipedia or Wikidata edit-a-thons. There are a lot of possibilities, but I’m not sure where we’ll go yet. I’m looking forward to that discussion.