A small step for humanity, but a big step for the National Historical Museums of Sweden in the work to re-establishing a digitally accessible infrastructure around our collection information!
We have now matched our first 1500 biographical records (persons and institutions related to our collections) to corresponding objects in Wikidata.
By telling the internet that a specific record in our system, which has a digital representation with a unique ID in our online collection search, is the same as a specific item in Wikidata, we make our collection information a little more accessible and useful.
We have a record representing Gustav III in our collection management system, it is thus also found in our online collection search. On that record, we also store a Wikidata ID, which tells us that Gustav III in our system is the same as Gustav III in Wikidata. On item for Gustav III in Wikidata is in turn our unique ID stored, which points back to the record in our system. This link allows us to easily find all relevant info about Gustav III, Wikipedia articles in all the world’s languages, important dates, pictures, relationships and much more if necessary. And because several other institutions has done the same thing, we can know that our record for Gustav III is the same as records for Gustav III in a number of other authority databases and collection databases around the world.
With the Wikidata Query Service, you can make queries for all the information in Wikidata. If you want to ask about our persons and institutions items, the property P9495 applies. For example, we can make a query to see all objects with our ID, and their Wikipedia articles in Swedish and English.
