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Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library/Newsletter/November-December2016

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The Wikipedia Library
Books & Bytes
Issue 20, November–December 2016
by Nikkimaria, Ocaasi, Samwalton9 and UY Scuti

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In this issue we announce a partnership expansion, highlight the #1Lib1Ref campaign, and, as always, present a roundup of news and community items related to libraries and digital knowledge.

New research accounts!

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We're excited about expanded research partnerships:

  • Adam Matthew is now offering access to all 53 of their online collections.
  • Gale has added access to Biography In Context, a database of biographical entries on more than 400,000 people from over 170 sources.

Sign up for this and many others!

Wikipedia Library A–Z

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Using the new A-Z search tool, you can search all periodicals indexed by Wikipedia Library partners. Enter a title in quotation marks to find exact matches, or use a likely keyword to find titles that contain it. This often-requested feature should help editors determine which databases are likely to be helpful to them.

#1lib1ref

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The 1lib1ref campaign is running again this year for Wikipedia's 16th birthday, from January 15 to February 3. This campaign calls upon librarians to "give a birthday present to Wikipedia by adding a reference to a reliable source".

Last year's effort was a success, with many library professionals from around the world participating in many languages. Some edited for the first time, others dusted off old accounts to engage with Wikipedia again. Some of the stories generated by the campaign are captured in this compilation. If you haven't yet, take a look at the lessons from last year's campaign.

This year's campaign offers a platform for engaging librarians in your region and context. There's even a pre-planned 1-hour "Coffee Kit" that you can use to host events. Check out the Meta page to learn more.

Spotlight: Wikidata Visiting Scholar

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This post is excerpted from the Wikimedia Blog. It was written by Jason Evans and Simon Cobb from the National Library of Wales.

The National Library of Wales has been sharing images openly on Wikimedia Commons for about two years. Along the way, the library realised they had a large amount of cataloguing data for some of the collections they were sharing. This metadata was not easily accessible and couldn’t be explored or visualised in any meaningful way. They decided to port all the information they had about their collection of Welsh Landscape prints into Wikidata—free, open, linked data which anyone can access, interpret and visualise.

In order to achieve this goal, the National Library of Wales handed their data over to Simon Cobb, the first Wikidata Visiting Scholar, who began the task of converting it into items, properties and qualifiers. Cobb needed to create Wikidata items for each of the 4,650 images in the collection, match up each of the collection's 586 artists and engravers with existing data, and create new entries for artists who were not yet recorded in Wikidata. He would also need to convert 1480 different descriptive tags into Wikidata items.

This work had several important outcomes. First, the artwork and metadata that comes with it are available to all, and it is hoped that this will encourage innovative reuse, visualisation, and interpretation, as has been demonstrated by the work of other ‘open’ cultural institutions like the Rijksmuseum and by the British Libraries BL Labs initiative.

Second, it is now possible to easily analyse the data in ways that was not possible before. As each item is comprised of statements that describe the entity’s properties, we can run queries that would not have previously been possible. This opens up answers to questions ranging from birthplaces of the artists and images created by members of the clergy, to tracing the development of the print trade in Wales and beyond.

New tools are being developed for visualising data, which are increasingly sophisticated and more user-friendly. Many of these tools are free to use and can be used to discover cultural data in new ways.

Bytes in brief

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Community roundup

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Newsworthy

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Worth reading (or watching)

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Excitement about #1lib1ref

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