The University of Maryland Libraries WikiProject: Challenges and Delights

Abstract

In June 2020, members of what is now the Cataloging & Metadata Services team launched a project to begin exploring Wikidata, a free and open knowledge base of structured data. Over the next two and a half years, almost two dozen participants created and edited 1,492 Wikidata items related to 1,294 collections from SCUA and SCPA. In the process, UMD's Wikidata editors got to know our special collections, explored a linked data interface, and made library resources more discoverable by users on the open web. This panel features four project participants, who will provide an introduction to the editing project and share some of the challenges, delights, and historical backstories they discovered while working on Wikidata.