Posted January 5, 2026 by L.P. Coladangelo, DS Catalog Project and Data Manager
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New Member: Union College
DS is proud to announce Union College as our newest member following a unanimous vote of approval. We at DS are looking forward to working with member representative Sarah Schmidt and her colleagues at Union. Special thanks go to Ron Patkus, DS Board of Directors Member and Vassar member representative, for facilitating early discussions with Sarah and her team, and to Joanna DiPasquale at Union for her help shepherding the membership process for the College.
To learn more about the manuscript objects in Union’s collections before they make their way into the DS Catalog, please follow this link: https://www.union.edu/special-collections/collections#manuscripts
New and Updated Records
New and additional data for manuscripts held by the following member institutions have been recently added to the DS Catalog:
These newly added and updated items now bring the DS Catalog to nearly 28,600 records. We continue to encourage those member institutions without records in the DS Catalog to contribute their data. We are also updating data for existing records in the DS Catalog to reflect the most current institutional information and descriptions available.
New DS-related Publication
A newly published article in the Journal of Open Humanities Data in their special issue on Wikidata and the Humanities details a successful project lead by DS staff to integrate manuscript metadata into Wikidata using DS Catalog records:
Integrating Premodern Manuscript Metadata into Wikidata: A Case Study in Ontology Design and Linked Data Reuse
Rose A. McCandless & L.P. Coladangelo
This article presents Digital Scriptorium’s efforts to model and integrate premodern manuscript metadata into Wikidata, addressing challenges posed by inconsistent cataloging practices and the limitations of existing data models. Building on the WikiProject Manuscripts Data Model, we identified key gaps, proposed ontology refinements, and developed scalable workflows for crosswalking, reconciliation, and upload. Our work demonstrates how domain-informed ontology design can enhance interoperability, machine-actionability, and data reuse, expanding access to manuscript metadata across institutions and platforms. We offer this case study as a model for thoughtful linked data integration grounded in humanities expertise.
To access the article, please click the following link: https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.431