by Christine Fernsebner Eslao, Metadata Technologies Program Manager
In November, a Wikidata edit-a-thon brought together an enthusiastic group of students and librarians to explore the Black Teacher Archive (BTA), a digital portal centralizing materials created by professional organizations of 20th century African American educators.
The project is based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in association with the Monroe C. Gutman Library Special Collections and is made possible through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Spencer Foundation. Nearly thirty edit-a-thon participants delved into the collection to translate the history of Black educators in the United States into freely available linked open data.
The BTA brings together materials from over 70 archival repositories across the United States and makes available for research more than 50,000 pages authored by African American educators. Education Metadata Librarian Te-Yi Lee led the edit-a-thon, an event open to all Harvard affiliates, as an inclusive approach to describing collections, empowering the collection’s users to engage in collaborative knowledge creation in a way that aligns with the values of open scholarship and the open nature of the BTA. The event team also included BTA Archivist Micha Broadnax, Data Services Librarian Lindsay Whitacre, and Metadata Technologies Program Manager Christine Fernsebner Eslao. ITS EDIBA intern Sarah Bernstein was instrumental to the early phases of the project.
Their goals were to surface connections between people via the communities and organizations they served in, by representing these relationships and connections to collection materials in Wikidata. Defining itself as “a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines,” Wikidata provides structured data to support Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and other Wikimedia projects, as well as being a source of linked data used in library metadata and digital humanities projects.
Together participants made over 400 edits in Wikidata, creating or expanding items that represent Black teachers who were also presidents of national or state Colored Teachers Associations (CTAs). Overall, less than half the editors had prior experience with Wikidata, and for many this was their first time engaging with the BTA. The atmosphere was one of camaraderie and shared discovery — supplied with coffee, snacks, and a brief crash course on Wikidata editing, participants clustered in small groups to work from 9:30 am to noon.
Their reasons for participating varied, but there were some common threads: they expressed a desire to learn about the BTA and share the work of the educators it represents, and some library staff in particular had enthusiasm borne of their previous experiences with Wikidata. “The immediacy and accessibility of Wikimedia platforms enable rapid gratification,” ITS event volunteer and project lead for Identifying Black American Military Court Guards in the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials Dawn Miller later told the organizers. “I saw this with participants. Their hands-on experience and data contributions generated satisfaction and a lot of smiles. Their work was visible not just to them but to the whole world.”