Standard Citation Forms for Rare Materials • Everyone can Edit: Cross-collaboration at NYU
Channel: LD4
Date: 2021-07-21

Standard Citation Forms for Rare Materials Cataloging in Wikidata, ​Zoe Dobbs​​​
As a participant in the PCC Wikidata Pilot Project, Yale University Library (YUL) has begun converting a portion of the Standard Citation Forms for Rare Materials Cataloging (SCF) database into Wikidata items. SCF (https://rbms.info/scf/) is a resource used by the rare book community that identifies and describes bibliographies, employing standardized citation strings as unique identifiers. These strings provide an authoritative way to link bibliographic descriptions in a library catalog to corresponding descriptions in an external source. Recently, stakeholders have explored adding URIs to SCF from sources such as http://id.loc.gov and Wikidata to prepare it for a linked data environment, inspiring YUL’s current project. Identifying bibliographies with persistent URIs could potentially facilitate citation, improve the accuracy and completeness of citation data, and provide a machine-readable link between bibliographic descriptions of the same resource.

Session attendees will learn how YUL’s project team familiarized themselves with Wikidata, developed an application profile based on the WikiProject Books data model, and used OpenRefine for conversion and uploading to Wikidata.

Everyone can Edit: Cross-collaboration at NYU on the Program for Cooperative Cataloging Wikidata Pilot, Alexandra Provo, Alla Roylance, Beth Katzoff, Charlene Chou, Gioia Stevens, Guy Burak, JooHwi Kim, Julian Allgood, Nancy Lin and Yahsa Razizadeh
Presentation slides (Google Slides)
In 2020, NYU Libraries joined the Program for Cooperative Cataloging’s Wikidata pilot. A group of metadata and subject specialists have been learning about Wikidata through six projects, focused on topics such as digital collections, physical manga collections, faculty identifiers/authority records, and names related to the Fales Library’s Downtown Collection. This session will present an overview of each project’s goals and commonalities, share outcomes both expected and surprising, and discuss how we have worked together as a group.

Common themes across projects will be detailed. For example, several of our projects focus on describing collection material, such as digitized serials from the Tamiment Wagner collections, the Afghanistan Digital Library, and physical collections of Japanese and Russian manga. Each collection has presented data modeling challenges and opportunities to engage with the wider Wikidata community. In the case of manga, an active community of editors participates in WikiProject Anime and Manga. Manga on Wikidata is modeled in hybrid fashion, with items describing both manga and anime. Another theme that links many of our NYU projects is multilingual description, particularly issues of transliteration. Our presentation will also reflect on the process of collaboration within NYU by sharing our process for combining the expertise of metadata and subject specialists.