How to Find Special Collections Materials on Wikimedia Commons

The purpose of The Compass Rose is to raise awareness of Special Collections' resources and to foster the use of these resources. The blog series also reports significant new programs, initiatives, and acquisitions of Special Collections.

This blog post is the third in our new "How To" series focused on using online resources to find Special Collections material.

Note on rights for Wikimedia Commons screenshots:

Files are available under licenses specified on their description page. All structured data from the file namespace is available under the Creative Commons CC0 License; all unstructured text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.

This week’s blog gives an overview of how to search Wikimedia Commons, the image and media repository for Wikipedia. It allows all media used on Wikipedia (including images, audio, video, and scanned text documents) to be uploaded to one location and then used in all language Wikipedias as well as other Wikimedia projects: Wiktionary, the free dictionary; Wikisource, the free library; Wikivoyage, the free travel guide; and many more projects.

Unlike the various other Wikimedia projects that have different language editions, most notably Wikipedia, there is only one Wikimedia Commons and it is designed to be international and multilingual. For this purpose, it has many different templates that are designed to internationalize core information, for instance the widely used "own work" source template and the "date" template, both of which are designed to automatically translate metadata into numerous languages. In addition to these internationalization templates, Wikimedia Commons also features a complex set of free licenses and public domain tags for nearly every conceivable copyright situation. On top of this, it has a very thorough, hierarchical network of categories for organizing files, which make content fairly easy to browse. Also, the keywords in the category names in addition to file descriptions and other fields make materials easily searchable, as long as they are well described and well categorized.

Since summer 2019, the UTA Libraries Special Collections (SPCO) have been uploading digitized materials already on the Digital Gallery and other UTA websites, such as Cartographic Connections, to Wikimedia Commons. The largest types of material included in these uploads are UTA's University Photographs and University News Service Photographs, postcards from the Jenkins Garrett Texas Postcard Collection, and historic maps from SPCO's cartographic connections. In addition to these are a few smaller groups of materials from other collections. As of April 2022, there have been over 3,000 total SPCO images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, over 300 of which are maps, which require more detailed and time-consuming description than the other materials uploaded.

These materials can be browsed via the categories they are in, either their "source" or "content" categories. There is one "source" category for all SPCO-contributed materials, as well as additional source categories representing individual collections or types of materials (ie, Pancho Medrano Collection, Jenkins Garrett Texas Postcard Collection, maps, etc.). These source categories are mostly for administrative purposes and making the provenance of SPCO-contributed materials clear, but they do function the same way as "content" categories and can be used to browse materials from SPCO.

Using "content" categories to browse on Wikimedia Commons is much more common and typically more useful than browsing "source" categories. While "source" categories are based on the provenance of the materials and the institution that holds and provided access to digital copies of them, "content" categories are simply topical and relate to the subjects and content of files. Great examples of "content" categories with many SPCO-contributed files in them are "Tarrant County Courthouse," "Postcards of Fort Worth," and "English-language maps of Texas." The hierarchical nature of these categories makes them easy to browse, with the "Postcards of Fort Worth" category logically being the child of the "Postcards of Texas by city" and "Fort Worth, Texas" categories.

In theory (although not always in practice), files on Wikimedia Commons should have one or more categories added to them, which then display at the very bottom of the page for each file. Clicking on one of these categories will take you to the category itself. Browsing categories is typically initiated either by doing this or by searching for content and then selecting a category from the search results instead of selecting a file. Much less common is using the index of "major" (high-level) categories on the Wikimedia Commons home page, which works but often takes much longer to locate relevant materials due to Wikimedia Commons' very hierarchical and thorough nature. In practice, starting from a category as general as "History" or "Mathematics" will likely require clicking through a very large number of child categories to find most useful or specific content.

Searching on Wikimedia Commons is straightforward. On every page on the site, there is a search bar in the top right with the text "Search Wikimedia Commons" and a magnifying glass icon that is used as the search button, in the style of many search engines. Boolean searching is possible on Wikimedia Commons, and quotation marks (for searching exact terms) and the "AND" operator (for searching files containing multiple distinct words) are particularly useful. For example, searching for Texas map (without quotations marks) returns over 70,000 results, while "Texas map" (with quotation marks) returns just 222, and "Texas" AND "map" returns over 16,000, the latter appearing to be more relevant to a search of Texas maps.

Wikimedia Commons fairly recently updated its search result pages, with the default search result pages now consisting of a gallery of file thumbnails that link directly to those files. This is a more modern approach to searching for images than the previous default option, and is more in line with the appearance of an image search on a search engine. While this is in many ways an improvement, it does have the one major weakness of no longer including categories in the default search results. To see them, click the "Switch to Special:Search" button near the top right corner of the page, which will present the "traditional" search results. This shows all search results on separate lines, appearing more like a traditional search engine (for web pages) than an image search. When running a query for maps of Texas (without quotes), "Special:Search" provides a link to "Category:Maps of Texas" on the first page of the search results, which is not visible in the default search results page. This strategy of starting with a search and then selecting a category for browsing can be quite efficient, but it does now require clicking that "Switch to Special:Search" button.

Searching and browsing on Wikimedia Commons is fairly intuitive, and with a little practice it easily becomes second nature. Searching and browsing Wikimedia Commons can be very rewarding because of just how comprehensive its collections are and the power of its licensing system, which only allows freely licensed or public domain materials. In simple terms, this essentially means no permission is needed to use any of these files, although some minor conditions such as crediting the author may be required. There are now over 80 million files on Wikimedia Commons, making it a good resource for finding files related to UTA or nearly any other topic.