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Wikidata & Wikibase for National Libraries - August 2019

Exploration of Wikibase by Librarians

Merrilee Proffitt, Senior Manager, OCLC Research �@MerrileeIam proffitm@oclc.org Q47542698

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OCLC - A global network of libraries

As of 30 December 2018

Americas

10,060 members in 23 countries

EMEA

6,050 members in 78 countries

Asia Pacific

1,472 members in 20 countries

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18,000

member libraries �worldwide who elect

48

delegates to Global �Council, who elect

6

members of the 15-member

OCLC Board of Trustees

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  • OCLC is a partner, providing infrastructure for…
    • The Netherlands (in partnership with UKB consortium)
    • Canada (in partnership with LAC)
    • United Kingdom (in partnership with Jisc)
    • New Zealand (in partnership with NLNZ)
  • LOC - joint work on many projects (e.g. Dewey)
  • VIAF
    • Collaborative effort between OCLC, National Libraries and other bodies to create an entified store of authority data

OCLC + National Libraries

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  • Long history of interest and contribution including
    • Contribution of VIAF records to Wikipedia(s) and to Wikidata
    • WorldCat discovery API integrated into Citoid
    • Wikipedia + Libraries: Better Together (training program for librarians)
    • EZProxy used by The Wikipedia Library as core infrastructure
    • Project Passage

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OCLC + Wikimedia

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  • Follow on from years of linked data research and implementation (including VIAF, FAST, work with Schema.org, linked data surveys, IIIF and more…)
  • Participation from 16 US institutions
  • 10 month duration
  • Wikibase instance with 1.2 million items imported from Wikidata (reconciled by OCLC)

About Project Passage

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  • “Sandbox” – safe place to play
  • A hands on opportunity with creating linked data to describe resources
  • Beyond the technical – created a community that could share work in progress, have philosophical and practical conversations, share inspirations and concerns

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About Project Passage

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  • Transition from human-readable records to knowledge graphs represents a paradigm shift. Most important new task: changing focus on the “item in hand” to “what entities matter to this object?”
  • Concerns about crowd-sourcing: adding unvetted information from unknown sources, diluting the integrity of curated library data

Lessons Learned

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  • Encapsulated in a comprehensive report (Q66250903); summary in two blog posts
  • Praise for the project - “Overall impression of the project: probably the most important US-based library-specific [linked data] work ever.”
    • Dorothea Salo, University of Wisconsin

Outcomes for Passage

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  • Another pilot - using Wikibase to manage linked data for digital collections (Cleveland Public Library, Huntington Library, U. Minnesota)
  • OCLC and library staff are excited (and nervous!) about possibilities
    • Stewardship of library data is a big responsibility
    • We are in an exciting moment of transition
    • We have been in other exciting moments of transition
    • We are in this together

Next steps