In a corollary project, Yale University Library, through the Wikidata for Digital Preservation project,66 is using Wikidata to store technical information about software preservation. Wikidata provides a way to model and create collaborative, responsive data that allows the software preservation community to reduce redundancies and maximize the sharing of work. Because Wikidata is a stable, collaborative project with a great deal of flexibility, it reduces barriers to collaboration and documentation that might make this work otherwise challenging.
How Can an Institution Get Started Adding Bibliographic Data to Wikidata?
- Host workshops on Wikidata.67
- Make micro-contributions by using existing external tools (for example through the Wikidata Distributed Game68 or through the Mix’n’match tool).69
- Add archival holdings to existing Wikidata items using the “archives at” property.70
- Create items for creators of archival collections and link them to your institution.
- Add missing descriptions to existing items in your language of preference.71
- Particularly for institutions where ORCIDs are widely used, and/or VIVO is deployed, create items for individual faculty members at your institution (including identifiers to external data sources)72 and their publications.
- Integrate existing local name authorities or vocabularies that are important to your institution through the Mix’n’match tool.
- Batch-upload data. There is a well-documented process for identifying and uploading batches of data to Wikidata.73 Data sets that might be a good fit for Wikidata include: data about people or other institutional entities that are relevant to your collections; extended information about the institution itself (especially
ARL White Paper on Wikidata: Opportunities and Recommendations
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