Authors, and Faculty Advisors in Texas A&M University's Mechanical Engineering Department Using Wikidata to Enhance Discovery for Dissertations

As a participant in the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) Wikidata Pilot, Texas A&M University (TAMU) created linked data in the Wikidata platform for a selected sample of mechanical engineering students, their doctoral dissertations and faculty advisors. This presentation will provide an overview of how an inter-departmental team of four cataloging/metadata librarians and one curator used tools such as OpenRefine and MixnMatch to populate Wikidata with metadata from OAKTrust, the TAMU institutional repository, as well Scholars.tamu.edu, its VIVO database of faculty member profiles. It will also describe efforts to manually enhance the items that were created and issues that were encountered, as well as experimentation with SPARQL queries to demonstrate the value of the transformed data. Finally, this presentation will cover potential implications that Wikidata may have for library workflows regarding the management and disambiguation of persons and other entities in the TAMU Libraries catalog and institutional repository.

Using Wikidata to Enhance Discovery for Dissertations, Authors, and Faculty Advisors in Texas A&M University's Mechanical Engineering Department Institutional Repository Document