Edit 2019/How can libraries and Wikimedia build each other up?: Submissions:2019/“Wikipedians are born, not made” – applying the learnings from a 10-year-old research paper after all

This submission has been designated as a lightning talk at WikiConference North America 2019.

Research libraries have long wanted to use linked, open data for...something. They haven't always been sure what. Decades of experiments with linked data have stumbled against obstacles related to data reliability and coverage. Libraries have struggled to develop and maintain in-house linked data software projects that serve narrow purposes.

Wikidata and DBpedia are a flowering of linked data, opening new vistas. Libraries are beginning to look to these projects to realize linked data ambitions that previously proved impractical. Maybe the landscape of isolated, special-purpose institutional projects can be transformed into a vast partnership.

A partnership opens the possibility of struggling against data reliability and coverages obstacles together, for mutual benefit of libraries and Wikimedia.

I work at Cornell University Library on a project that is using Wikidata and DBpedia to supplement metadata about items in library collections, and to make our catalog easier to navigate. We're exploring how we can give back to Wikimedia, contributing to the community and thereby increasing the reliability of our own project. I'd like to talk about it, and I'd like to get community input about what else we can be doing.