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Abstract

Cultural heritage institutions with digital resources, ranging from digitized collections to online finding aids, have increasingly pursued creative solutions to make their collections more open and reach more users. One strategy for increasing access to digital cultural heritage resources is the addition of links or uploaded media to the Wikimedia environment. However, existing literature detailing the process and results of such strategies centers primarily on the work of large research institutions and focuses on web analytics to show success of such projects. It is unclear if smaller institutions with niche and focused collections will see the same results as many of these programs have reported. There is also little evaluation of other means of impact for cultural heritage institutions linking their holdings to Wikimedia products, such as reuse of images or information published to Wikimedia by cultural heritage institutions. In order to contribute to the knowledge gap in this area of research, this article details a case study in linking and uploading digital assets from a medium sized liberal arts college to Wikimedia projects, and assesses impact via web traffic, wiki reuse, and image reuse. The details of this research include concrete examples which should allow for easily reproducible assessment strategies for other institutions to implement.

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