User:Timathom

About me

I am a librarian who works with data and is eager to get more involved with Wikipedia and GLAM-Wiki initiatives. Leave a message on my talk page, or find me on Twitter @timathom.

My interests as an aspiring Wikipedian are intertwined with my professional identity as a librarian. Over the years, cultural heritage institutions like galleries, libraries, archives, and museums have produced a wealth of data. A significant portion of that data has been devoted to describing the people and organizations responsible for creating information resources. In library parlance, this work is known as "authority control"—essentially the process of establishing and maintaining an official ("authorized") record for an entity in order to uniquely identify it. In large part, I see my contributions to Wikipedia as an extension of the authority work that librarians have traditionally performed. When I work on a biographical Wikipedia page, I think of its structured data as constituting a kind of enhanced authority record.

I believe that contributing to Wikipedia can help librarians, archivists, and curators reframe their professional relevance in new ways. In today's often chaotic information landscape, archives and special collections are the unique resources that set cultural heritage institutions apart. And yet the individuals who care for these unique resources are also stewards of information about the unique people associated with them. As a global, ubiquitous platform, Wikipedia can serve as a powerful tool for curating the information that is out there publicly about the people and organizations represented in archival and special collections. Conversely, Wikipedia itself stands to benefit from the high-quality data and curatorial attention to detail that librarians, archivists, and others have worked so dilligently to develop over time.

Conflict of interest statement

I, User:Timathom, am an employee of the University of Miami Libraries, where I work as a Metadata Librarian and help manage and describe the Libraries' digital assets. My specific responsibilities include metadata creation for collections in Spanish.

Wikipedia editing is not a part of my formal job description, and my Wikipedia edits do not represent the views of my employer in any official capacity. However, my contributions to Wikipedia may reference people, organizations, or holdings associated with the University of Miami Libraries. I pledge to abide by Wikipedia guidelines in my edits and to further the goals of Wikipedia by contributing relevant, reliable information. If at any time my contributions appear to be in violation of Wikipedia community norms, I ask that other editors not hesitate to contact me via my user talk page.

At the University of Miami Libraries, I have also been involved in the development of a tool called the Remixing Archival Metadata Project (RAMP) editor. The purpose of this tool is to let users generate enhanced archival authority records and then contribute the content of those records to Wikipedia. The RAMP editor first extracts biographical and historical data from archival finding aids to create new authority records for persons, corporate bodies, and families associated with archival and special collections. It then lets users enhance those records with additional data from sources like VIAF and WorldCat Identities. Finally, it transforms those records into wiki markup for direct publication to Wikipedia through its API. The RAMP editor is open source software available under an Educational Community License, Version 2.0 (ECL-2.0).

Timathom (talk) 23:42, 29 November 2013 (UTC)