Recording from March meeting & reminder of April 24th meeting + speakers!

[Shani Evenstein Sigalov]

Dear all, 

I hope all had a nice Easter / Passover / Spring break and that this finds you well.

1) Our March meeting recording:

Thanks to everyone who were able to join our March Open Meeting, especially our presenters, Dr. Anne Chen,and Jan Ainali.. 

A recording is available here, as well as a link to the playlist that hosts all meetings. Below is an AI short summary.  

2) Our April meeting reminder + speakers: 

Our next meeting will take place next Friday, April 24th, at 15:00. 

Link to calendar invite here. 

We will have two presenters in the first hour: 

* Helen Williams, Metadata Manager, Library, London School of Economics and Political Science. Helen will present on "LSE’s Adventures in Wikidata-land: tears and triumphs down the rabbit hole".

* Prof. Christof Schöch,  Professor for Digital Humanities, FB II,  Co-Director, Trier Center for Digital Humanities. Christof will present on: "LOD+LLMs: Bridging Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Graphs at the Trier Center for Digital Humanities".

Below are the full blurbs and bios. 

3) WMBR GLAM-WD framework: 

The last portion of our coming meeting will be dedicated to the AI-BRIDGES pipeline / workflow for  how institutions can easily donate data. We are building on work done by Wikimedia Brasil, that designed the framework presented. 

You are all invited to read through the framework and edit / comment with one main question in mind -- does the framework still hold today, or is there anything we need to add / remove / change in it? 

This is a collaborative effort, so please share your experiences and help shape how the AI-BRIDGES pipeline / workflow looks like. Our discussion will focus on whether there are things to change in that framework before delving into more details with each section of the framework in the coming meetings. 

4) AI-BRIDGES Symposium:

The full (and almost complete) program was released just before Easter. 

You are all welcome to join us in London for the main Symposium day. Registration is still open, so if you haven't already, please register!

We also announced that on Thursday, May 28th, the pre-Symposium day, which will be dedicated training day, we will have a 3 hours strategic meeting related to Wiki & AI, supported by Wikimedia Switzerland. Any Wikimedian attending the Symposium is welcome to join. More details on that in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, a huge thank you to Ilario Valdelli and Alek Tarkowski for leading this. 

See you next week,

Shani. 

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April speakers details

1)  Helen's Blurb

In 2019 the power of Wikidata to create links and reveal relationships between entities sparked an exploration of its potential to increase the discoverability and accessibility of library metadata.  With no prior experience or knowledge of Wikidata, what followed was a steep learning curve.  Since then, LSE Library has established WikiProjects for PhD theses and for a collection of oral history suffrage interviews, and Wikidata is now being piloted to share Digital Library metadata and to support research visibility work at an institutional level.   This short presentation offers a fast-paced overview of that much longer journey highlighting the challenges and successes we encountered down the rabbit hole that led us to Wikidata-land!

Bio

Helen joined LSE Library in 2005, having previously worked at the Institute of Directors and the London Library. She has been in her current role as Metadata Manager since 2014, and has responsibility for Library collections and research outputs metadata, with a strategic focus on exploring and developing new ways in which metadata can support research, learning and teaching. In 2025 she appointed a Wikimedian in Residence to her Metadata team with a two-year focus on research visibility.

She has been involved in metadata initiatives at a national and international level, including as a committee member of MDG from 2009-2016, as part of the Metadata 2020 collaboration, and as a current member of OCLC’s Metadata Managers Planning Group. She has recently participated in OCLC working groups on AI in metadata workflows and a UKI focus group on Reimagining Descriptive Workflows. She has authored and co-authored a number of metadata articles and conference papers and regularly collaborates with metadata practitioners in the UK and beyond.

LinkedIn 

helskrw.bsky.social 

0000-0003-1259-7097 

LSE profile 

2) Christof's Blurb: 

The aim of this talk is to present the ways in which the Trier Center for Digital Humanities, a research center founded at Trier University in Germany in 1998, is combining the use of Linked Open Data and Large Language Models in our investigations of literary and cultural heritage. Several use cases illustrating this approach, its benefits and its challenges will be discussed, ranging from French Literature to historical wine labels and scholarly publications. 

For background, you can check here: https://christof-schoech.de/en.html  

AI Summary for March Meeting

The AI Bridges Open Forum meeting focused on presenting two institutional knowledge projects and discussing pipeline design for making institutional data more accessible through Wikidata and Wikibase. 

Dr. Anne Chen presented her International Digital Daring Europos Archive project, which uses Wikidata to connect fragmented archaeological collections from a site in eastern Syria, including both physical artifacts and archival photographs, while incorporating multilingual labels and local community knowledge. 

Jan Ainali presented the GovDirectory project, which aims to create a comprehensive collection of public organizations worldwide using Wikidata, with full coverage in Sweden and partial coverage in other countries like the Netherlands. The conversation ended with a discussion of Wikimedia Brazil's framework for working with GLAM institutions, which includes four phases: political, legal, technical, and dissemination, with participants discussing how this framework could inform the development of an AI-powered pipeline to help institutions contribute their knowledge to Wikidata more effectively.