Linking the Art in the Christian Tradition Database to Wikidata

Abstract

The Art in the Christian Tradition image collection and database was developed to support the Vanderbilt Divinity School’s Revised Common Lectionary website, but it has become an important source of images in its own right. To improve discoverability, we started a project to create Wikidata items for all works in the collection, with the goal of linking those items to as many images in Wikimedia Commons as possible. We describe several challenges we faced in the early stages of the project. We provide an introduction to creating an item and refer to some useful tools for learning how to edit Wikidata and to perform bulk uploads. We end by describing how features of Wikidata can make artworks more discoverable and how we hope to improve the quality of our image metadata in the future.