Preface

Wikidata for Scholarly Communication Librarianship was developed for anyone working in an academic library (or interested in working in an academic library) who may have a small or large role in supporting scholarly communication related services. The first two chapters, however, could serve as a basic introduction to Wikidata for anyone in academic librarianship. The remaining three chapters focus on a few topics that may be of more interest to those who work on open metadata, research metrics, and researcher profile projects.

This work is an outgrowth of projects initiated at IUPUI University Library. These projects began with a pilot program to add all core faculty members of the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy to Wikidata and to display the resulting profiles in Scholia (Lemus-Rojas, M., & Odell, J., 2018). Using what we learned from the pilot and with the participation of libraries on the IUPUI campus, the Scholarly Profiles as Service project was launched with the aim to establish Wikidata entries for all IUPUI-affiliated faculty and to create entries for the scholarly articles these faculty produce. The project site for this endeavor is available at: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_IUPUI_University_Library.

We would like to thank the OER + ScholComm team (Josh Bolick, Maria Bonn, and Will Cross) for creating a platform, the Scholarly Communication Notebook, and a funding mechanism for works like this one. We also appreciate the efforts of the Wikidata community and local colleagues that have participated in the ongoing efforts to advance open knowledge as well as Katelynn Sinclair (who provided copy editing) and Ashley Dirzis (who tested the sex or gender model discussed in this work).

Versions: Hyperlinks to IUPUI websites were updated on July 9, 2024 following the dissolution of IUPUI and the establishment of IU Indianapolis. – J.O.

About the authors

Jere Odell (0000-0001-5455-1471). Scholarly Communication Librarian, IUPUI University Library. Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis.

Mairelys Lemus-Rojas (0000-0002-3727-2187). Head of Metadata Services, Brown University.

Lucille Brys (0000-0002-9521-6685). Open Knowledge Specialist, IUPUI University Library. Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis.

References

Lemus-Rojas, M., & Odell, J. (2018). Creating Structured Linked Data to Generate Scholarly Profiles: A Pilot Project using Wikidata and Scholia. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 6(1), eP2272. https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2272