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 faculty, buildings in existing data sets); or data about geographical entities from the local region.

Wikidata in the Landscape of Scholarly Communication

Academic institutions and their libraries are interested in collecting and sharing bibliographic information related to the scholarship produced by their faculty and researchers. This not only facilitates visibility and recognition of their work, but also strengthens the institution’s reputation. There are a number of resources and tools available to faculty, researchers, and their institutions for sharing their scholarly activities. One way this is accomplished is by displaying faculty profiles in institutional websites, which can contain both biographical and bibliographical data, or using academic network sites74 to expose the data. For instance, managing identities using ORCID;75 tracking citations in Google Scholar Citations; networking with other faculty and researchers with similar interests in ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and LinkedIn; or using VIVO,76 a cross-institutional application used to track the productivity of faculty and researchers. Limitations to these approaches include the need for individual faculty or researchers to keep the data up-to-date (both biographical and bibliographical), and the fact that the data shared on these sites are not always structured or licensed in a way that would allow for them to be easily reused.

Academic institutions have demonstrated the appetite and readiness for both research library communities and the larger scholarly community to access, share, and discover scholarly materials without restrictions. The promise of linked data in libraries is in part associated with the importance of making research more visible for communities to use and reuse for the creation of new scholarship. Open bibliographic metadata initiatives in the Wikimedia arena include the Initiative for Open Citations77 and WikiCite.78 ARL White Paper on Wikidata: Opportunities and Recommendations