Due to the complex and unique nature of manuscripts as handwritten objects, there exists no standard cataloging methodology for manuscripts. Institutional metadata contributed to the Digital Scriptorium (DS) Catalog, an online union catalog aggregating manuscript records from institutions across North America, varies in robustness of description, encoding formats, and other elements of data organization. The DS Catalog, therefore, enables the harmonization of diverse institutional descriptions and the broader linked data environment, which includes Wikidata, an open, crowdsourced, global database for structuring data.
Out of a desire for increased discoverability and data reusability, the research team developed a crosswalk from the DS Catalog and Wikidata to address issues of interoperability between metadata schemas and vocabularies by matching semantically equivalent or similar elements or values. In order to upload manuscript records from the DS Catalog to Wikidata, the research team identified ways to map the DS data model, and the manuscript records and data values found in the DS Catalog, to Wikidata. This lightning will provide a brief introduction to the development of this mapping process, the tools used, obstacles encountered, and solutions identified, and the implications for the future of manuscript cataloging and data reuse.