Empowering Italian GLAMs: A Workflow for Building a Comprehensive Open Dataset of Museums on Wikidata

Wikidata hosts the most comprehensive repository of Italian museums, enriched through the Empowering Italian GLAMs project1 (2022–2024). The initiative created 1,304 new items and enhanced more than 6,800 existing items with ISTAT data (2011, 2015, 2017–2021), covering visitor numbers, staff, accessibility, facilities, and digital collections. In collaboration with ICOM Italia, records were curated manually, region by region, and linked to GLAM Wiki initiatives. This dataset was used to contact all Italian museums, inviting them to adopt open access policies and to collaborate with Wikimedia projects. It has also served as the foundation for analyses and academic studies, and functions as a tool for monitoring and visualising museum-related data. The dataset continues to be expanded and updated. The same data curation process has been applied to Italian libraries, archives, theatres, and universities. The Empowering Italian GLAMs project has designed and implemented a workflow to enhance GLAM-related data on Wikidata and to foster research and collaboration. The project is currently being replicated in Argentina.