Integrating Wikidata at the Library of Congress | The Signal

"There has been a growing interest from libraries and other cultural heritage organizations in Wikidata. Of the many potential uses for Wikidata, one emerging area of focus has been using Wikidata as a hub for institutional identifiers. Many organizations maintain unique identifiers for people, subjects, works, etc. If these IDs are all added to Wikidata then you could seamlessly access data from dozens of sources if you know the Wikidata ID. If we return to the author example from above you can see the Wikidata page for Virginia Woolf has ninety external links to various organizations. Many of these are national libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions including the Library of Congress.

The Library of Congress maintains many authority files that are widely used. Two of the largest are the Name Authority File (NAF) and Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). The Network Development and MARC Standard Office maintains the Linked Open Data version of these files at the site id.loc.gov. For example, authority data for Virginia Woolf is located at //id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n79041870. This data ensures that items being cataloged are all referencing the same person. One of the goals of linked data is to make sure you link out to other’s data. With id.loc.gov we maintain links to many other institutions authority files including the French and German national libraries, other government services such as Department of Agriculture and other cultural institutions like the Getty Museum. You’ll notice these links on the page and are also present in the machine readable data. With the potential of Wikidata being a hub of identifiers we wanted to also include links in our authority record out to Wikidata....

Using records from the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division I built an interface that combines Library of Congress collection items with Wikidata information. This tool demonstrates the possibilities in connecting these two knowledge systems...."