Posted June 10, 2026 by L.P. Coladangelo, DS Catalog Project and Data Manager
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New Members
We are proud to announce two institutions newly joining DS: Haverford College as a Member and The Athenaeum of Philadelphia as an Associate Member. We look forward to the opportunity to work with Sarah Horowitz and her team at Haverford and Beth Shalom Hessel and Jill LeMin Lee at The Athenaeum.
2026 Annual Meeting: Save the Date!
The Annual Meeting of the DS Membership will be held on Friday, September 18, 2026 in Rochester, NY, hosted jointly by DS members University of Rochester and Rochester Institute of Technology. More details about the meeting, including an agenda and program, will be announced closer to the date.
Workshops on Linked Open Data and SPARQL
DS will offer a series of workshops exploring Linked Open Data and the use of the query language SPARQL in the context of the DS Catalog Wikibase. Workshops will be led by L.P. Coladangelo, DS Catalog Project and Data Manager, and are scheduled for Thursdays in July from 1pm to 2:30pm ET over Zoom. The workshop series is intended for those with beginning to intermediate knowledge of SPARQL.
July 2: Introduction to Linked Open Data and Wikibase
July 9: SPARQL Basics
July 16: Modifying SPARQL Queries
July 23: Exploring Graph Patterns and Property Paths
July 30: Extending and Combining Linked Data
To learn more and register, click here. Please note that space is limited!
New Blog Post
In this month’s blog post, DS Fellow Kelly Tuttle gives a recap of DS at the Digital Medieval Studies Institute workshop that occurred prior to the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, MI. Participants were guided through the process of generating manuscript description and transforming those descriptive elements into machine-actionable data. Check out her blog post here!
Manuscript Items in Wikidata
DS continues its project to represent DS Catalog items in Wikidata, one of the world’s largest free and open knowledge bases of structured data. There are now over 14,800 DS-represented manuscript items in Wikidata, placing them alongside items from other international collections to be searched and discovered in one place. We have been happy to collaborate with the WikiProject Manuscripts group to help integrate DS-represented manuscripts in Wikidata. To learn more about this research, please follow this link: https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.431
To view a list of DS-represented items now uploaded to Wikidata, click the following link to go to a pre-populated query in the Wikidata Query Service: https://w.wiki/CK5u. Once there, click on the “Execute Query” button in the left-hand toolbar (the button that looks like a “play” button). The query will run and show you a list of items, with clickable links to their Wikidata records and the ability to download the list.