[open-bibliography] Wikipedia project: bibliographic-archival data base

Tue Sep 13 14:08:17 UTC 2011

Just to let you know, we have two projects going on at the Harvard
Library Innovation Lab that may bear on this:

1. Our Lab just completed the first part of an effort to locate the
articles about books in the English Wikipedia. We're in the process of
writing up the results, but the short version (not for distribution
yet, please, because we're still drafting the post about it): 1.
Wikipedia does not make it easy to identify pages that are about
books. The category system doesn't work the way one hopes. The
ever-helpful dbpedia is only of limited help with this. 2. We've
identified a total of 57,000 articles that are about books; that is,
the article has the title of a book as its own title, and is devoted
to that book. We got to this number via category lookups, through some
brute force interrogation, and by refining the results via Mechanical
Turk.

2.  We have talked over the past year with SJ Klein, who is a
Wikipedia Docent and on the Wikimedia board, about integrating
LibraryCloud with his idea for giving a permanent page to every work
cited in Wikipedia. LibraryCloud is a metadata server gathering
library metadata (circ data, user reviews, etc.) and making it openly
available via APIs and Linked Open Data. This is a multi-library
initiative that's been under development for about 1.5 years, with
five contributing libraries at the moment, and about 15M items.  We
are on the verge of making it accessible to a limited public (API key
required, daily queries limited to 3,152). We're interested in
contributing what we can as we can. (No, we cannot make its catalog
available in its entirety. We wish.)

David Weinberger
self at evident.com
co-dir, Harvard Library Innovation Lab