Background
In alignment with ongoing efforts to support open scholarship, the library supports open knowledge projects with a focus on those that leverage the Wikimedia ecosystem, including Wikidata, the linked data knowledge base.
Institutional Commitment
The University Library Center for Digital Scholarship aims to increase awareness of Wikidata and to contribute to Wikidata in ways that align with the library and the university’s missions.
Recent Wikidata Projects
In a pilot project that began in 2017, we created entries in Wikidata for 19 core faculty members from the IU Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. We also created entries for many of their works and their associated co-authors. This work can be viewed by using a scholarly profile tool, Scholia, that searches and displays data from Wikidata. See: Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy on Scholia. The article Creating Structured Linked Data to Generate Scholarly Profiles: A Pilot Project Using Wikidata and Scholia documents this project.
Scholarly Profiles for IU Indianapolis
Based on our experience with the School of Philanthropy's pilot project, in a second wave of work, we developed and implemented the Scholarly Profiles as Service model. The aim is to provide a presence in Wikidata for all IU Indianapolis-affiliated faculty and publications that they produce. In the initial focus, we created entries in Wikidata for all core women faculty from the 16 campus-based schools. The focus on women faculty contributes toward balancing the prevalent gender inequality in the knowledge base.
Wikidata and Collections
We are also working on projects to increase the representation of our archival collections and library-hosted publications (open access journals & dissertations) in Wikidata. Additionally, we continue to experiment with new and existing tools to facilitate contributions and test workflows to maximize efficiency.
Interested in participating or learning more about Wikidata and open knowledge? Please contact us at: digschol@iu.edu.