The bibliographic metadata in Wikidata: Wikicite and the «Bibliothecae.it» case study

Abstract

In recent years, the attention of the librarian world aimed at the progress of Linked Open Data technology and Wikimedia projects has focused on Wikidata, whose infrastructure has proved to be perfectly compatible with Wikicite, an initiative that aims to build a vast database of bibliographic references in linked open data. As part of this initiative, many projects originate from collaborations between the Wikimedia Foundation and libraries: the Library of the University of Salerno also actively participated in the initiative, including the bibliographic metadata of the journal Bibliothecae.it. It is the first italian example of corpus related to a scientific periodical of bibliographicbiblioteconomical scope entirely loaded in Wikidata. The project allows the use of data in any project or program that uses the LOD technology, in order to facilitate the interchange between cultural resources and satisfy the information needs of the user. In the area of bibliography and librarianship, this action represents a new way of creating and sharing bibliographic data, of doing information retrieval and of conducting bibliometric analysis. The positive effects of the project concern the wiki community, which needs reliable and verified sources to base its contents, and the scientific community: by openly publishing the citations sets, an enormous graph of scientific knowledge is opened, encouraging the dissemination, publication and open evaluation of research results.