Metadata of nearly thousand Finnish media artworks in an international database!
MEHI – History of Media Art in Finland has compiled a database of metadata on around 1,000 media artworks in 2021–2022. The database contains, among other things, the names of the works, the years in which they were created and information on the most central creators of the works. The metadata of the works will be available on the Finnish Finna.fi service in spring 2023.
In January 2023, the metadata from the media art database was shared to the international Wikidata database. It is a volunteer-built database that supports Wikipedia. Susanna Ånäs, a specialist in open data, was responsible for this, assisted by information specialists Mira Rissanen and Sandra Lindblom.
– The metadata we collect on media artworks is similar to the data collected by Finnish museums on artworks. In Wikidata, the metadata is slightly different, and therefore we couldn’t share all the information there. It took a lot of work to reconcile two different databases, but we still wanted to open up metadata on Finnish media art internationally, says Sandra Lindblom, an information specialist.
The works of media art and persons and communities linked to them that the MEHI – History of Media Art in Finland project has added to Wikidata can be browsed here. Specific media artworks can also be searched in the Wikidata database, for example by the name of the work or artist.
Photo: Marikki Hakola’s PRE (1984) is one of the works added to Wikidata by MEHI – History of Media Art in Finland. Photo by Marikki Hakola, CC BY-SA.
Text: Sandra Lindblom