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Featured Books
    All Featured Books
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  • Home
  • News
  • Featured Books
    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
  • User Stories
  • Campaigns
    • Fossil Stories
    • Garden Stories
    • Monsters Are Real
    • Page Frights
    • Her Natural History
    • Earth Optimism 2020
  • Tech Blog
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Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

All posts tagged with wikidata

BHL News, Blog Reel, Tech Updates

BHL is Round Tripping Persistent Identifiers with the Wikidata Query Service

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In the Spring of 2022, the BHL Cataloging and Metadata Committee investigated the possibility of harvesting persistent identifiers (PIDs) from Wikidata as part of the group’s longstanding project to disambiguate and deduplicate author records in the BHL database. The motivation behind this one-time experimental data harvest was to see if BHL could:

  1. Enhance BHL author records with additional PID data points;
  2. Improve the committee’s ability to disambiguate author names in the BHL database; and
  3. Respond to an outstanding user request from two of Wikimedia’s super star editors, Siobhan Leachman and Andy Mabbett, to expose BHL’s author data on BHL and include hyperlinks to other authoritative knowledge bases on the web.

In particular, Wikimedians wanted to see the Wikidata Q identifier exposed, providing a link to the corresponding creator item record in Wikidata.

There are multiple motivations for undertaking this work. By adding the BHL Creator ID to the corresponding Wikidata item, Wikidata editors help link BHL to the richer biographical data about that person held in Wikidata. The Wikidata item for a person may contain links to their Wikipedia page or to images of the person held in the image repository Wikimedia Commons. Wikidata items also act as identifier hubs and contain links to other databases and identifiers.

By adding the BHL Creator ID to this list of identifiers, the Wikidata editor is linking the content held in BHL to the content held in multiple other datasets and repositories.

These extra author data points provide Wikimedians and BHL catalogers with crucial clues that aid in name disambiguation. In particular, hyperlinks to other knowledge bases are incredibly valuable because they lead to new knowledge pathways that help confirm a person’s identity in a complex game of “Who’s Who?”

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February 15, 2023byJJ Dearborn and Siobhan Leachman
BHL News, Blog Reel, Campaigns, Her Natural History

#HerNaturalHistory: Open Data, BHL, and Wiki Projects

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Wiki projects, including Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, contain the information that powers the web. Wikipedia is the fifth most-visited website in the world. To edit a Wiki project is to contribute content that could, potentially, be viewed by thousands or even millions of people over time, both on Wiki sites and on sites like Google and Facebook, which harvest data, including media, from Wiki sites.

For the #HerNaturalHistory campaign, the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden and the Smithsonian Libraries held three crowd-sourcing citizen science/citizen humanities events in March of 2019. These events were intended to bring new editors to Wiki projects, have editors add information about female scientists to Wikipedia, and have editors add information to BHL collections on Flickr and in Wikimedia Commons utilizing the Wikidata knowledge base/database/catalog.

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March 19, 2019byEsther Jackson and Grace Costantino
BHL News, Blog Reel

BHL and WikiCite 2018

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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.

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January 31, 2019bySiobhan Leachman, Diane Shaw and Katherine Mika

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The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. Headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives in Washington, D.C., BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to digitize the natural history literature held in their collections and make it freely available for open access as part of a global “biodiversity community.”

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