In November 2018, Diane Shaw, Katie Mika and Siobhan Leachman attended WikiCite 2018 in Berkeley, CA. WikiCite is a Wikimedia initiative that aims to develop a database of open citations and linked bibliographic data.
Katie, a former BHL National Digital Stewardship Resident from Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, and Siobhan, a citizen scientist and linked open data champion from New Zealand who has been a devoted transcriber of natural history materials in the Smithsonian Transcription Center, gave a talk on WikiCite and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. They described some of the unique challenges for heritage literature and metadata, and demonstrated how open access citations, images, and details gleaned from BHL and other open natural history digital repositories are applied to Wikimedia Foundation projects to support essential documentation of scientists, literature, and rare and endemic species.
