The Role of Librarians in Wikidata and WikiCite

The other week I participated in WikiCite 2017, a conference, summit, and hackathon event organized for members of the Wikimedia community to discuss ideas and projects surrounding the concept of adding structured bibliographic metadata to Wikidata to improve the quality of references in the Wikimedia universe. As a Wikidata editor and a librarian, I was pumped to be included in the functional and organizational conversations for WikiCite and learn more about how librarians and GLAMs can contribute.

The Basics (briefly and criminally simplified)

Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums are institutions that collect, preserve, and make available information artefacts and cultural heritage items for use by the public. Before databases librarians managed card catalogs to facilitate access, which were translated into MAchine Readable Cataloging (MARC) data format digital records to create online catalogs (ca. 1970s-2000s). As items in collections are being digitized, librarians et al. add descriptive, administrative, and technical/structural metadata…