Wikidata:Tools/Paulina
Paulina is a web application, based on Wikidata, that provides a simple and user-friendly interface to search for authors and cultural works, identify works in the public domain in different jurisdictions, and access those works. It is developed in Python and is currently in an early development phase, available in English, although in the future it will be multilingual.
Paulina aims to be a tool for a better exercise of cultural digital rights at individual and community levels. The main beneficiaries are librarians, local cultural activists, artists, researchers, teachers and students from the Global South and underrepresented communities, who currently do not have reliable and user-friendly tools to identify and access local heritage in the public domain.
Paulina can also facilitate the collaboration between Wikimedians and heritage institutions with limited resources to make copyright clearance for their digitization projects.
Why we created Paulina
The enormous complexity of copyright is a barrier to accessing works in the public domain. In addition to long copyright terms, there is a lack of clear and reliable data about the public domain, resulting in precarious access to cultural heritage online. This problem affects libraries, museums and archives, as well as users of cultural works, from researchers, teachers and students to the general public. This deepens the inequity in access to knowledge suffered by minority language communities in countries and regions where information in the public domain is scarcer and poorly systematized.
To address this problem, new tools are needed to facilitate access to works, improve metadata and make copyright clearance simple in different jurisdictions. A project of this scale is impossible without a collaborative approach. Wikidata is an ideal environment to tackle the task, as it is a project with thousands of active contributors.
However, Wikidata is a generalist database, which does not have a specific interface for querying and editing public domain data in a simple way. In addition, Wikidata has important biases and information gaps that manifest themselves in the underrepresentation of vast sectors of authors and works, especially of marginalized communities and languages.
Our firm intention in this project is to make this problem visible, actively improving the representation of diverse communities in the global cultural heritage.
Using Paulina
Try the public alpha version available at https://paulina.toolforge.org/.
Introduce the name of an author in the search form:
Select the specific author in the search results list:
You’ll see basic information about the author and the public domain status of their works:
Click on ‘Search works’ button to access a list of works already existing as Wikidata items:
You can click on any work to see relevant information about the work:
The information about the work includes the copyright status and download links when available. If you note that there is a gap or error in the data available about authors and works, you have a link to edit the item on Wikidata. In the future it will be possible to log in and edit Wikidata from Paulina.
If you click on the copyright term shown in the work’s ‘Copyright status’ field, you can see the list of countries where that term applies:
You can also click on any country to know its exact copyright term:
Roadmap
Paulina is a project in active development which aims to facilitate the discovery, access and collaboration around the online public domain. In order to meet this mission, we have a four phases roadmap:
Phase 1: Easy search
We are building a multilingual search engine, based on Wikidata, to find works in the public domain and easily access to online available versions. The search bar will provide a user-friendly interface with an intuitive rapid search of authors and works, plus an advanced search with powerful filters.
Phase 2: Community
In partnership with different communities (librarians, local cultural activists, Wikimedians, Creative Commons chapters), the project will co-organize a series of public domain data-donation and data-editing meetups to reduce biases and gaps in online cultural heritage data. These meetups will help to discover practical problems with existing cultural data modeling in Wikidata and will serve to propose improvements based on the needs of the communities involved, with special emphasis on marginalized communities.
Phase 3: Internationalization
In order to facilitate the use and adaptation of the tool in different contexts, we will make the web application multilingual, and we will build comprehensive documentation to facilitate the creation of national, regional or thematic versions of Paulina, according to the needs of each community.
Phase 4: Collaboration
In an advanced stage, Paulina will provide a friendly interface to edit Wikidata through our web application, making it easier for collaborators to fill the gaps in cultural data and public domain information.
Free software
Paulina is open-source, published under a GNU Affero General Public License Version 3. The software repository is available at https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/toolforge-repos/paulina.
Credits
Paulina Project is supported by Ártica - Centro Cultural Online, Wikimedistas de Uruguay, Creative Commons Uruguay and Data Uruguay.