Submissions:2025/Institutional History, Archival Technology Development, and Collections Discovery: The Contributions of the City University of New York to Wiki platforms
This submission has been noted and is pending review for WikiConference North America 2025.
Title:
- Institutional History, Archival Technology Development, and Collections Discovery: The Contributions of the City University of New York to Wiki platforms
Type of session:
- Lecture (15-30 min)
Session theme(s):
- Missing pieces
Abstract:
The City University of New York has had a long engagement with various aspects of the Wikimedia movement for the last 10+ years. In 2025, CUNY welcomed its first Wikimedian-in-Residence, Richard Knipel. Richard’s two-year residency coincides with a 3-year archival initiative at CUNY called the Cultivating Archives and Institutional Memory Project, funded by a 2-million-dollar grant from the Mellon Foundation. The twelve archivists working on this project have worked closely with CUNY’s Wikimedian-in-Residence to bring the university’s archival collections into wiki platforms and use the wikidata platform to create entity records for the people represented in the university’s archival collections. So much of CUNY’s history and information about its publicly accessible archival holdings are missing on wiki platforms, and the team has found many creative ways to remedy those silences.
This session will feature a kaleidoscope of rapid case studies of their work that demonstrate the diverse and far-reaching nature of the intersections between archival practice and wiki editing. Projects include the development of articles connected to the Disability Rights movement and the development of a plugin for open-source software ArchivesSpace that will query Wikidata for authority records to be used in archival description. The team will also discuss how they have navigated issues around conflict of interest when editing articles about the history of CUNY and its affiliated scholars.
Author name(s):
Wikimedia username(s):
- patrick.mcgee58
Affiliated organization(s):
- Wikimedia NYC
Estimated length of session
- 30 minutes
Will you be presenting remotely?
- I will present in-person
Okay to livestream?
- Livestreaming is okay
Previously presented?
- Richard Knipel and Natalie Milbrodt plan to present a somewhat broader CUNY topic at Wikimania 2025 in August, but without the strong focus on and participation from the Associate Archivists in this session.
Special requests: