Project VandyCite: Using Wikidata to Support Research Information Management

Abstract

Project VandyCite began during spring 2020 as librarians and staff members at the Vanderbilt University Library transitioned to offsite work due to COVID-19. The goal of the project was to enlist librarians and staff to add bibliographic information about faculty members at Vanderbilt University to Wikidata.

Date
Oct 28, 2020 12:22 PM — 12:52 PM
Location
Virtual

Project VandyCite began during spring 2020 as librarians and staff members at the Vanderbilt University Library transitioned to offsite work due to COVID-19. The goal of the project was to enlist librarians and staff to add bibliographic information about faculty members at Vanderbilt University to Wikidata. In the space of a few months, members of the project who had never previously used Wikidata became effective and productive editors, with some participants reaching more than 10,000 edits. In this talk, we discuss how we prepared the groundwork for this project by developing a bot (VanderBot) to create items for faculty members, how we helped our colleagues to become effective editors, and our plans for scaling this initiative to other libraries.