The records of a single archival collection are inherently linked via a complex web of interrelationships between topics, people, places, and historical events. Current archival practices and metadata standards, however, do not easily facilitate the discovery of these relationships. In January 2025, Archivists at Dana Library on the campus of Rutgers University - Newark launched a pilot project utilizing Wikidata to make the complex data-sets about a jazz collection and a collection about an historic Rutgers-Newark student protest available to researchers. This presentation will explore how the archivists repurposed existing metadata to create new records in Wikidata, as well as provide an overview of the challenges, surprises, and successes.
