










































“Let All the World in Every Corner Sing”


Listen and Learn sessions  231

“Let All the World in Every Corner 
Sing”
Providing Linked Data Access to Global 
Christian Hymnody in Wikidata
Christa Strickler, Collection Metadata Integrity and Management Librarian, 
University of Notre Dame

ABSTRACT WikiProject Christian Hymns began as one individual’s involve-
ment in a pilot project to test Wikidata as an identity management platform, 
but it has continued on as a standalone project to improve the coverage 
of global Christian hymnody in Wikidata and connect the resulting data 
to library resources. The complexity of hymnody creates challenges in the 
Wikidata environment, with tunes ranging from African American spiritu-
als and medieval chant to contemporary Christian worship melodies and 
adaptations of folk music. The addition of texts from a variety of sources 
and languages increases the complexity. This paper describes the creation 
of the project, discusses the difficulties encountered in developing a data 
model, shows visualizations that explore various aspects of the data, and 
demonstrates connections with library resources while considering ongo-
ing challenges. 

BACKGROUND

Wikidata, a community-curated structured data repository related 
to Wikipedia, offers an opportunity for cultural heritage institutions 
to experiment with new ways of providing access to their resources. 
Freely editable, Wikidata allows anyone with an Internet connection 
to create and edit metadata for nearly anything in the world, from 
chemical formulas to buildings to Cookie Monster. Thanks to its pub-
lic domain Creative Commons license, Wikidata’s metadata can be 
reused in all sorts of applications, including Wikipedia infoboxes, 
search engine knowledge panels, and artificial intelligence applica-
tions such as Siri and Alexa. This free and open model has attracted 
participation from galleries, libraries, archives, and museums look-



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ing for new ways to enhance their collection metadata and share it 
outside of traditional library data silos.

As part of this wave of participation, the Library of Congress Pro-
gram for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) launched a pilot program dur-
ing the COVID-19 pandemic in the fall of 2020 to test Wikidata as an 
identity management platform that might make it easier for catalog 
and metadata librarians to create name authority records (https://
www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_PCC_Wikidata_Pilot). 
I was working from home as a catalog librarian at Wheaton College 
at the time, and I needed a project to help fill the work-from-home 
hours, so I signed up for the pilot program. Participants were allowed 
to create their own projects, so I decided to work on Christian hymns 
for the following reasons. First, I have an educational background 
in music and Christian theology, with performance experience in 
sacred choral music, so I had personal expertise in the knowledge 
domain. Second, my family owns a personal collection of hymnals 
and related reference sources that I could refer to without relying on 
access to library-owned resources while the building was closed for 
the pandemic. Third, there had been little activity in Christian hymns 
in Wikidata up to that point, so there was a large knowledge gap in 
that subject area. Finally, the Wheaton College Archives & Special 
Collections owns an extensive hymnal collection comprising more 
than 2,000 Protestant hymnals from the 1790s to the 1980s (https://
archives.wheaton.edu/repositories/5/resources/774), and I hoped to 
connect my Wikidata work with the library’s hymnal collection. 

For my project scope, I chose one hymnal, Glory to God: The Pres-
byterian Hymnal (Glory to God 2013). I had a copy of it at home, so 
it was easily accessible. My main sources for information were the 
hymnal itself; the hymnal’s companion volume (Daw 2016), which 
had background information on the hymns and hymn writers in the 
hymnal; the Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology (https://hymnology.
hymnsam.co.uk/), an online subscription resource covering a vari-
ety of topics in global Christian hymnody; and Hymnary.org (https://
hymnary.org/), a free online index of hymns and hymnals. Hymnary.
org was especially important because each tune, text, and person 
that it indexes has an identifier that is a valid property in Wikidata, 
so I wanted to use those identifiers to link the data in Hymnary.org 
to  Wikidata. Additionally, Hymnary.org’s data is downloadable as a 
.csv file, making it easier to set up batch uploads of data to Wikidata.

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_PCC_Wikidata_Pilot
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_PCC_Wikidata_Pilot
https://archives.wheaton.edu/repositories/5/resources/774
https://archives.wheaton.edu/repositories/5/resources/774
https://hymnology.hymnsam.co.uk/
https://hymnology.hymnsam.co.uk/
https://hymnary.org/
https://hymnary.org/


Listen and Learn sessions  233

With all of this in place. I was ready to start. I sat down with the 
hymnal, intending to add or edit each hymn manually. However, it 
quickly became apparent that this was going to be far more com-
plicated than I initially imagined. This hymnal has 852 hymns, for 
starters. But then there were all of the composers, hymn writers, 
translators, and other factors that I hadn’t considered. I had failed 
to consider the data model.

DATA MODELING

Wikidata has a variety of data models that can help one figure out 
how to format data for Wikidata items in various subject areas. For 
example, there are data models for books (https://www.wikidata.org/
wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Books), music (https://www.wikidata.org/
wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Music), and so on. If Wikidata editors con-
sistently follow these models, then the data is easier to use because 
it follows expected patterns.

When I started, there were few items related to hymns in Wiki-
data, so there was no data model to draw from. The data that was 
already in Wikidata had been entered inconsistently, so I could not 
easily infer a data model from existing data. Having no idea what I 
was getting into, I began creating items without a data model. Im-
age 1 shows the data model in my head. There would be one Wiki-
data item for each hymn, and one for each person involved with the 
creation of the hymn. Pretty simple, right? But then there was real-
ity. From the moment I began looking at the first hymn, “Holy, Holy, 
Holy,” with English text and a Korean translation, I started to real-
ize that the model in my head didn’t fit reality. And it went downhill 
from there. What you will see next are some of the challenges that I 
faced in relation to data modeling.

IMAGE 1 Original mental construct of a data model for hymns

A fundamental challenge I encountered is that one hymn does 
not equal one Wikidata item -- at least, not exactly. One way of look-
ing at a hymn is to see it as one entity, basically like a song, as you 
can see in Image 2 on the left. That was how I originally thought of 

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Books
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Books
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Music
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Music


234  atLa 2023 ProCeedinGs

it. However, from an academic and liturgical viewpoint, hymns are 
more like two entities combined: a text and a tune, and you can mix 
and match tune and text pairings if they have the same hymn metre, 
which is the number of syllables for the lines in each stanza. This 
second version is how Hymnary.org models it, and it uses identifi-
ers for both text and tune. Once I had a better sense of my data, this 
was also how I wanted to model it because that’s how scholars would 
likely want to use it.

IMAGE 2 The model on the left shows as a hymn as one entity, like a song; the model 
on the right shows a hymn as two entities: a text and a tune.

Hymnary.org then combines tune and text into a hymn instance, 
with its own identifier, for each time a particular combination of text 
and tune is published in a hymnal (see image 3). If the same combi-
nation of a text and tune appears in 100 hymnals, then Hymnary.org 
will record 100 instances for it.

IMAGE 3 Hymnary.org’s use of a hymn instance for each time a combination of text 
and tune is published in a hymnal.

I thought about doing this but decided against it. If I were to imple-
ment it, there would be at least 1,391 instance items titled “Amazing 
Grace” in Wikidata, which would make it difficult for people wanting 
to find other Wikidata items with that title, such as the album Amaz-
ing Grace by Aretha Franklin. I also chose a hymn instance, but I’m 
not implementing it the same way as in Hymnary.org, with one in-
stance for each time it shows up in a hymnal. Instead, Image 4 shows 



Listen and Learn sessions  235

how I use it for a unique combination of text and tune, regardless of 
how many times that combination shows up in different hymnals.

IMAGE 4 My use of a hymn instance for a unique combination of text and tune, 
regardless of how many hymnals use the combination.

Even though I have now figured out a model that incorporates the 
concepts of hymn instance, tune, and text, putting it into practice can 
get complicated, as the following example shows. Image 5 shows the 
Wikidata item for “Jesu, Meine Freude,” the hymn text written by 
Johann Franck in 1653.

IMAGE 5 Wikidata item for “Jesu, Meine Freude:” https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/
Q118445051

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q118445051
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q118445051


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There is also a Wikidata item for the hymn text “Jesus, Price-
less Treasure,” which is Catherine Winkworth’s 1863 translation of 
“Jesu Meine Freude” into English (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/
Q118445068). The German text and the English translation are typi-
cally set to the hymn tune titled JESU, MEINE FREUDE, composed 
by Johann Crüger in 1653, and this hymn tune has its own Wikidata 
item (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q109747915). Then there is the 
version of the tune JESU, MEINE FREUDE that was harmonized by 
Johann Sebastian Bach in his motet Jesu, meine Freude (https://www.
wikidata.org/wiki/Q118445111). I keep this separate from the original 
tune because some hymnals include the Bach harmonization and 
some do not, and I consider Bach significant enough to make the dis-
tinction. For the text and tune alone we already have four Wikidata 
items. Now we combine them to get more. There is a Wikidata item 
for the hymn instance of “Jesu, meine Freude,” which is the combina-
tion of the original German text with the original unharmonized tune 
(https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q17050641). Another item exists for 
“Jesu, meine Freude,” the hymn instance that combines the original 
German text with the harmonized tune (https://www.wikidata.org/
wiki/Q118445130). Yet another hymn instance item describes “Je-
sus, Priceless Treasure,” which combines the English translation of 
the text with the harmonized version of the tune (https://www.wiki-
data.org/wiki/Q118445101). At some point, I would like to figure out 
how best to connect the German text and harmonized tune with the 
item for Bach’s motet (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q892166), but 
that has some unresolved complications. This comes to eight items 
involved with one hymn, not counting the items related to the com-
poser, the hymn writer, the translator, and the harmonizer. 

Another challenge was to ensure that the data models that I cre-
ated would dovetail into the models already in Wikidata. My musical 
content overlapped with music data models already in existence, so 
I needed to make sure that I didn’t contradict what was already in 
place. Image 6 shows the Wikidata item for the hymn tune “All Things 
Bright and Beautiful,” by William Henry Monk. When I first started 
creating items for hymn tunes, I would create a Wikidata statement 
claiming that the item was an instance of a hymn tune.

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q118445068
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q118445068
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q109747915
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q118445111
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q118445111
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q17050641
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q118445130
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q118445130
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q118445101
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q118445101
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q892166


Listen and Learn sessions  237

IMAGE 6 Wikidata item for “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” as originally modeled: 
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q63243861

After creating several items in this manner, I discovered that 
Wikidata’s WikiProject Music (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/
Wikidata:WikiProject_Music) preferred all musical works to be an 
instance of a musical work/composition to help with standardized 
data querying across all musical works in Wikidata. The type of mu-
sical work should then be indicated by using musical form and genre 
statements. Image 7 shows how I adapted my data model to reflect 
the WikiProject Music model and fixed the data in the items I had 
already created. Hymn tunes became instances of musical work/
composition, with the form of hymn tune.

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q63243861
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Music
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Music


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IMAGE 7 “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” after it was edited to reflect new model: 
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q63243861

Similarly, hymn instances such as “To God Be the Glory” by Fanny 
Crosby and William Howard Doane were once described as an in-
stance of a Christian hymn (see image 8).

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q63243861


Listen and Learn sessions  239

IMAGE 8 Wikidata item of “To God Be the Glory,” before it was edited to reflect the 
new model: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2855428

But now the recommended model is to describe them as an in-
stance of a musical work/composition, in the form of a song, with the 
genre of Christian hymn (see Image 9). This makes them consistent 
with the WikiProject Music model. There is still data clean-up needed, 
however, because other Wikidata editors have created hymn items 
that do not conform to this.

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2855428


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IMAGE 9 “To God Be the Glory,” after the item was edited to reflect the new model: 
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2855428

Yet another challenge is determining what to do when to fit into 
existing models in Wikidata when they are insufficient or incorrect. 
When I first started working on this project, the Wikidata item for 
the concept of “Christian hymn” conflated the idea of a hymn text 
with the idea of a hymn that combines a text and a tune. The concept 
of Christian hymn was defined as a type of Christian song, but the 
item had other properties that indicated that a Christian hymn could 
also be defined as a hymn text, as you can see on the right side of Im-
age 10, where it says a Christian hymn is also known as a hymn text.

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2855428


Listen and Learn sessions  241

IMAGE 10 Close-up of the definition and labels for the Wikidata item for “Christian 
hymn” before the concept was changed: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q856713

In some ways, this definition is accurate. A hymn text alone could 
be called a hymn, but for purposes of describing hymn texts sepa-
rately from Christian hymns that combine a text and tune, this was 
a problem. Also problematic was that the item allowed the use of a 
Hymnary.org text ID, tune ID, and instance ID to be used to describe 
a full hymn (see Image 11). This does not match Hymnary.org’s data 
model at all. The text ID only refers to a text, the tune ID only refers 
to a tune, and Hymnary.org’s concept of a hymn instance was differ-
ent from anything in Wikidata.

IMAGE 11 Close-up of allowed properties for the Wikidata item for “Christian hymn” 
before it was changed: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q856713

Before I could start adding hymn texts to Wikidata, I had to sort 
out this mess. I could have just fixed it all without telling anyone, but 
I wanted to be a good Wikidata citizen, so I asked the community. Ev-
ery Wikidata item comes with a discussion page, so I described my co-
nundrum on the “Christian hymn” item discussion page (https://www.
wikidata.org/wiki/Talk:Q856713) to see if anyone had any problems 
with my proposed solution. Nobody did, so I began fixing the prob-
lem. I created an item for a hymn text (see Image 12), then moved 

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q856713
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q856713
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Talk:Q856713
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Talk:Q856713


242  atLa 2023 ProCeedinGs

over all of the properties from “Christian hymn” that were only ap-
propriate for the hymn text alone, such as the Hymnary text ID.

IMAGE 12 Wikidata item for “hymn text:” https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q116953130

Another challenge I’ve come across is the modelling of hymn tunes 
not originally written as hymn tunes. Some songs that appear in hym-
nals, particularly contemporary ones, are not technically hymns at 
all, such as national anthems, African American spirituals, gospel 
songs, traditional folk music, Taizé chant, and contemporary Chris-
tian pop music. The growing diversity in our hymnals is a beautiful 
thing to see, but with diversity comes complexity, which creates chal-
lenges in data modeling. My current solution is to describe the tune 
both as a hymn tune and as a more generic melody, adding extra de-

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q116953130


Listen and Learn sessions  243

tails so that others looking for the tune can find it whether they’re 
looking for it as a hymn tune or in another form. For example, BÍ-
NÍU (see Image 13) is an adaptation of a Bunun rice-pounding song 
from Taiwan. For this tune, I’ve still claimed that the musical form is 
a hymn tune, but I have also added melody as a form. To reflect the 
cultural origins of this tune, I have added other statements to indicate 
that the original work comes from the Bunun people of Taiwan. It is 
not a perfect solution, so I may change my data model in the future 
if a better option presents itself.

IMAGE 13 Wikidata item for the hymn tune BÍ-NÍU: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/
Q114273586

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q114273586
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q114273586


244  atLa 2023 ProCeedinGs

Now that I have worked out some of the modeling challenges, I 
have created a simplified visual of my data model (see Image 14), to 
show how the different pieces fit together.

IMAGE 14 Simplified diagram of data model for the project

Each box represents a category of item, and the rows in each box 
indicate some of the properties that can be used to describe that kind 
of item. The hymn instance is at the center of the model, and this 
hymn instance connects to hymnal works and editions, hymn texts 
and translations, hymn tunes and adaptations, and all of the people 
involved in creating and editing them. You can see the comprehen-
sive version of this in table format on the project page (https://www.
wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Christian_Hymns#Models), 
which contains information on describing composers and hymn 
writers, hymn instances, hymn texts, and hymn tunes.

DATA VISUALIZATIONS

A benefit of using Wikidata for this project is the ability to use pre-
made data visualizations that open new avenues for exploring the 
data. These data visualizations are created using the SPARQL query 
language in the Wikidata Query Service (https://query.wikidata.org/). 
I’m still learning SPARQL and don’t know how to do anything com-
plicated, but here are some samples of what I’ve done so far.

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Christian_Hymns#Models
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Christian_Hymns#Models
https://query.wikidata.org/


Listen and Learn sessions  245

The most comprehensive visualization is a graph that explores 
the connections between all of the items in the project (https://w.
wiki/4DWJ). It’s rather unwieldy since the project has become so 
large, but I love browsing it to see the connections that I might not 
notice otherwise. In Image 15, you can see Martin Luther connected 
to several tunes and texts for which he is responsible, along with 
connections to other Protestant Reformation figures (such as Philipp 
Melanchthon, Martin Bucer, and John Calvin), which shows relation-
ships between major Reformation figures and the hymnody devel-
oped during the time period. You can also see Luther’s influence by 
Augustine, whose writings have also made appearances in Christian 
hymn texts.

IMAGE 15 Close-up of graph visualization of the project, focused on Martin Luther 
and his connections in hymnody: https://w.wiki/4DW]

https://w.wiki/4DWJ
https://w.wiki/4DWJ
https://w.wiki/4DWJ


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The online timeline creation tool Histropedia (http://histropedia.
com/) can use Wikidata queries to generate timelines. The timeline 
shown in Image 16 includes all people in the project who have a re-
corded birth date.

IMAGE 16  Histropedia timeline of all of the people in the project with a recorded 
birth date, faceted by religion: https://shorturl.at/hyZ16

You can zoom in and out of a time period to see more people. This 
one focuses on the Protestant Reformation era, so you can see people 
such as Martin Luther, Thomas Tallis, John Calvin, and Theodore 
Beza. You can further focus the timeline by clicking on the facets on 
the left to narrow by a particular religion. This is only as good as the 
data it draws from, however, and Wikidata is weak in coverage of 
religion, so that needs some cleaning up. An additional quirk that I 
haven’t been able to figure out is that when Wikidata records two 
potential birth dates for a person, they appear twice in the timeline, 
as Image 16 shows with Martin Luther and Martin Bucer. I’m hop-
ing to fix that at some point. You can also create timeline facets for 
other characteristics such as geographic location.

Data visualizations have also helped me identify gaps in my con-
tent, so I’ve changed my project scope as a result. This map data visu-
alization from 2021 (see Image 17) shows that the bulk of my hymn 
writers and composers at that time had been born in the United 
Kingdom, Western Europe, and the East Coast of the United States.

http://histropedia.com/
http://histropedia.com/
https://shorturl.at/hyZ16


Listen and Learn sessions  247

IMAGE 17 Map visualization showing the birth places of all hymn writers and 
composers in the project in 2021: https://w.wiki/4JKk (as seen in 2021)

Also in 2021, almost 200 hymn writers in the project were Eng-
lish speakers, 60 were German speakers, and a few other languages 
trailed behind, mostly Western European (see Image 18). Data like 
this inspired me to diversify my work, so I have expanded my scope 
to include a more global variety of hymns.

IMAGE 18 Bar chart showing all the languages spoken by the hymn writers in the 
project in 2021: https://w.wiki/4KiH (as seen in 2021)

https://w.wiki/4JKk
https://w.wiki/4KiH


248  atLa 2023 ProCeedinGs

While this new scope has come from a variety of sources, I have 
particularly focused on Sound the Bamboo (2006) and its hymnal 
companion (Loh 2013). The hymnal contains hymns from a variety of 
Asian locations, while the hymnal companion contains background 
information about the hymns and their composers. Because of the 
Asian emphasis, the current map visualization (see Image 19) shows 
more hymn writers from Japan, Korea, China, India, Indonesia, and 
the Philippines, but I’ve also seen expansion in Brazil, Panama, and 
parts of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

IMAGE 19 Map visualization showing the birth places of all hymn writers and 
composers in the project in June 2023: https://w.wiki/4JKk

English language speakers still dominate at 326, but I’ve seen in-
roads in Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Mundari, Burmese, and others. The 
updated bar graph with all of the new languages is too large to show 
in a legible way, but you can see an up-to-date version at https://w.
wiki/4KiH. In order to increase the project’s global diversity in the 
future, I’ve begun compiling a list of hymnals to focus on later that 
include hymns from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbe-
an (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Christian_
Hymns#Other_Sources_for_Focus).

CONNECTIONS TO LIBRARY MATERIALS

Because I’ve been spending so much time working on the hymn 
tunes, hymn texts, and composers and writers involved in Christian 

https://w.wiki/4JKk
https://w.wiki/4KiH
https://w.wiki/4KiH
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Christian_Hymns#Other_Sources_for_Focus
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Christian_Hymns#Other_Sources_for_Focus


Listen and Learn sessions  249

hymnody, I haven’t been able to make many connections to library 
materials yet, but that’s still a major goal of the project. I need a criti-
cal mass of hymn data in Wikidata first, and then I can create batch 
processes to connect that data to library resources. Before I can ac-
complish that, a major task is to sort out the hymnals. Up to this point, 
I’ve been working at the level of texts, tunes, and people. None of 
these things are library materials. But hymnals and hymn reference 
sources are. The reference sources aren’t so much of a problem, but 
the hymnals are trickier for two main reasons. The first problem is 
that there isn’t a good model in Wikidata for music scores. Wikida-
ta’s WikiProject Music has a model for musical compositions at the 
work level (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_
Music#Composition_properties), but nothing for published mani-
festations that I’ve found, so I’ll need to come up with something on 
my own. I will likely make them somewhat like books, with separate 
items for works and editions as is recommended in WikiProject 
Books (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Books). 
The reason I would want to do this is that some hymnals come in 
multiple editions. One example is the Genevan Psalter, which was 
important in the Protestant Reformation and is still influential in con-
temporary hymnody. It came in eight editions ranging from 1539 to 
1562. These eight editions vary in content, so it would be important 
to differentiate them in Wikidata. However, I haven’t yet figured out 
how to indicate that while the editions are in volumes like a book, 
their content is mostly musical rather than textual. 

The other problem is creating an effective batch process to add 
hymnal items to Wikidata. I could enter them manually, but that 
would take a lot of time. Hymnary.org lists 6,523 hymnals in their 
database, and they don’t index every hymnal in existence. I would 
like to create a batch process to save time. One option is to use the 
data from Hymnary.org. There I can do a browse search for all of 
the hymnals in their collection (https://hymnary.org/search?qu=%20
in%3Ahymnals), download the data in .csv format, and upload the 
data to Wikidata in a batch using the data tool OpenRefine (https://
openrefine.org/). However, for this approach to work for connecting 
the Wikidata items to library materials, the data needs to include 
OCLC identifiers, and Hymnary does not include that data. When I’ve 
manually looked up hymnal titles from Hymnary in OCLC, the data 
often doesn’t match, so I have to sort out that problem. 

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Music#Composition_properties
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Music#Composition_properties
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Books
https://hymnary.org/search?qu=%20in%3Ahymnals
https://hymnary.org/search?qu=%20in%3Ahymnals
https://openrefine.org/
https://openrefine.org/


250  atLa 2023 ProCeedinGs

However, this does not mean that library connections aren’t al-
ready happening. A good example is the hymn tune ANTIOCH, com-
posed by Lowell Mason. Some may be more familiar with it as the 
tune for the Christmas carol “Joy to the World.” Image 20 shows the 
Wikidata item for ANTIOCH displayed in Reasonator (https://rea-
sonator.toolforge.org/?&q=60463566), a data visualization tool re-
lated to Wikidata.

IMAGE 20 Reasonator page displaying the Wikidata item for ANTIOCH, highlighting 
the “described by source” section: https://reasonator.toolforge.org/?&q=60463566

The top section highlighted in Image 20 shows reference sources 
that describe the tune. Somebody wanting to know more about AN-
TIOCH could look it up in Reasonator and find library-owned refer-
ence sources that would tell them more about that tune, if the data 
is recorded in Wikidata. The section shown in Image 21 lists some 
hymn books in which the tune is published.

IMAGE 21 Reasonator page for ANTIOCH, highlighting the “published in” section: 
https://reasonator.toolforge.org/?&q=60463566

https://reasonator.toolforge.org/?&q=60463566
https://reasonator.toolforge.org/?&q=60463566
https://reasonator.toolforge.org/?&q=60463566
https://reasonator.toolforge.org/?&q=60463566


Listen and Learn sessions  251

The section highlighted in Image 22 shows that this tune can be 
found in the Yale University Library Digital Collections.

IMAGE 22 Reasonator page for ANTIOCH, highlighting the “collection” section: 
https://reasonator.toolforge.org/?&q=60463566

If you look that up in the Wikidata item for ANTIOCH, you will 
be directed to the appropriate page in the Yale University Library 
Digital Collections, which has a digital scan of the tune from a copy 
of Lowell Mason’s Occasional Psalm and Hymn Tunes (1837): http://
digital.library.yale.edu/digital/collection/1027_2/id/28. The “External 
sources” section shown in Image 23 links to other identifiers, two of 
which direct to library data.

https://reasonator.toolforge.org/?&q=60463566
http://digital.library.yale.edu/digital/collection/1027_2/id/28
http://digital.library.yale.edu/digital/collection/1027_2/id/28


252  atLa 2023 ProCeedinGs

IMAGE 23 Reasonator page for ANTIOCH, highlighting the “External sources” 
section: https://reasonator.toolforge.org/?&q=60463566

These identifiers are important for connecting this Wikidata work 
to discovery of library resources. As part of the Linked Data for Pro-
duction project, Cornell University has created a prototype in their 
discovery layer, Blacklight, that uses data from Wikidata to enhance 
library catalog records for classical music (Clarkson et al. 2023). 
Their work is reliant on the linking of these library identifiers with 
Wikidata identifiers to pull the data together. This tells me that the 
hymn data I’m creating in Wikidata could be usable in similar ways. 

CONCLUSION

Though the project started as a small part of the PCC Wikida-
ta Pilot, it has continued past the pilot to become its own proj-
ect: WikiProject Christian Hymns (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/
Wikidata:WikiProject_Christian_Hymns). It currently includes 1,364 
hymn writers, composers, and translators; 1,901 hymn tunes; 895 
hymn texts; and 570 hymn instances. Even more valuable than this is 
the complex web of relationships built between these items, a grow-
ing knowledge graph that has the potential to connect researchers 
of Christian hymnody with library resources in new ways. There is 
much work to be done before this can be truly valuable for those 
who are interested in global Christian hymnody. Among other things, 
much more data needs to be added and quality assessment processes 
need to be developed, but a solid foundation has been laid for fu-
ture work.

REFERENCES

Clarkson, Emma, Steven Folsom, Huda Khan, and Astrid Usong. 
2023. “Linked Data via Vivaldi: A Musical Journey from 
Wikidata to the Library Catalog.” Presented at the LD4 

https://reasonator.toolforge.org/?&q=60463566
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Christian_Hymns
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Christian_Hymns


Listen and Learn sessions  253

2023 Conference, 11 July 2023. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=TFl28pCkoHs.

Daw, Carl P. 2016. Glory to God: A Companion. Louisville: 
Westminster John Knox Press.

Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal. 2013. Louisville: 
Westminster John Knox Press.

Loh, I-to. 2013. Hymnal Companion to “Sound the Bamboo”: Asian 
Hymns in Their Cultural and Liturgical Contexts. Chicago: GIA 
Publications. 

Sound the Bamboo: CCA Hymnal 2000. 2006. Chicago: GIA 
Publications.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFl28pCkoHs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFl28pCkoHs

