The Don Swaim Collection dashboard was developed in the Summer of 2020 to bring together past work on Swaim and see if linked open data available from the Library of Congress and Wikidata could help deepen a collection overview. Using the URIs provided by the Metadata Services Department when assigning LCNAF headings for Swaim's interviewees, id.loc.gov was queried to see if there was an associated Wikidata entry for each interviewee, and if there was it was downloaded and collated. Don Swaim interviewed many high-profile and well Wiki-documented public figures, but Wikidata entries for many of his interviewees was sparse or nonexistent. The dashboard shows charts for occupations, languages, and genders and each show "unknown" as one of the top categories. This also hides that many of the entries in those categories may be incorrect, inadequate, or misleading (the confusion of "English" and "American English" in languages, "writer" as a career, the gender binary etc.)
An unexpected success was Wikidata's documentation of awards. Wikidata seems to have better coverage of awards than it does demographic classifications like languages spoken or occupations, and in the case of Don Swaim's interviewees many of these awards are more descriptive than those abstract categories (e.g. Hugo winners are acclaimed sci-fi authors, the Purple Heart is given to wounded service members, the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame honors women associated with the U.S. state of Michigan.) The dashboard provides a visualization of Swaim's interviewees and their awards using network data analysis tool Cytoscape and a JavaScript popper extension to show clusters of associated awards and awardees as well as link back to their CONTENTdm records.
These dashboard prototypes were developed as drop-in enhancements for the built-in CONTENTdm collection landing pages to try to give browsers a high-level overview/summary of what is in a collection. There is also a more advanced prototype using the open source version of Plotly Dash but it requires Python-equipped hosting to render.