MCN2015

Thomas J. Watson Library, the central research library at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, has been collaborating with Wikipedia for three years to enhance access to our Digital Collections. In this time we’ve added citations to over 2,000 relevant Wikipedia articles that link to items in our Digital Collections. While this number sounds large, it has not been a particularly labor intensive project, distributed amongst both staff, graduate assistants, and interns. The impact, though, has been huge. In March 2012, we had just over 6,000 pageviews; by March 2015, we had over 118,000. This represents more than a 1,800 percent increase in pageviews. As a result, 2014 was the first year we had over one million pageviews. Perhaps most impressive of all, Wikipedia now drives over 50% of the traffic to our Digital Collections, which is an increase from literally 0% four years earlier. The project now has its own GLAM-WIKI page, which can be viewed here. This case study provides an easily replicable model for other institutions to adopt.