This is a guest post by Matt Miller, a Linked Data Applications Technical Specialist in the Network Development and MARC Standards Office in Library Services.
Wikidata is described as “a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines.” Very similar to its wider known sibling Wikipedia, Wikidata is a collaborative community driven project. While users of Wikipedia create and edit encyclopedia articles, when you contribute to Wikidata you create structured data. The quickest way to understand Wikidata is by looking at an entry. For example, if you look up an author, you see a list of claims about that person: Birth date, notable works, occupation, and many other biographical statements. When combined with the hundreds of millions of other entries in Wikidata it creates a very powerful database. You can learn more about Wikidata from this short video.
There has been a growing interest from libraries and other cultural heritage organizations in Wikidata. Of the many potential uses for Wikidata, one emerging area of focus has been using Wikidata as a hub for institutional identifiers. Many organizations maintain unique identifiers for people, subjects, works, etc. If these IDs are all added to Wikidata then you could seamlessly access data from dozens of sources if you know the Wikidata ID. If we return to the author example from above you can see the Wikidata page for Virginia Woolf has ninety external links to various organizations. Many of these are national libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions including the Library of Congress.
The Library of Congress maintains many authority files that are widely used. Two of the largest are the Name Authority File (NAF) and Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). The Network Development and MARC Standard Office maintains the Linked Open Data