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 at IUPUI, who has participation, training, and advocacy for Wikimedia and open knowledge as secondary responsibilities. Look into a Wikipedian/Wikimedian in Residence. More than 150 libraries, museums, archives, and other institutions have hosted Wikimedians in Residence since 2010. “The Wikipedian in Residence is not simply an in-house editor: the role is fundamentally about enabling the host organisation and its members to continue a productive relationship with the encyclopedia and its community after the Residency is finished.”111 Convene different sectors of the library—technical services, scholarly communication, information literacy and public services, etc.—to look at opportunities in Wikidata to advance the library’s strategic goals.

Conclusion

It is unlikely at this point that Wikidata can replace systems needed to manage collection inventory, transactions, and other practical aspects of managing linked data within library systems. However, it is vitally important for the library community to invest in linked data solutions that benefit the larger ecosystem of scholarly metadata creators. Linked data should connect and make more interoperable the information created by different disciplines and fields, helping knowledge become less balkanized by the scholarly communities that create it. This requires a global community of collaborators, across many disciplines, and globally interoperable technology.

While libraries have generally seen the benefit of making their data openly available as linked data and enabling semantic data within their systems, the ability to implement projects or create linkable data has been out of reach for many institutions and organizations. Some of this is due to lack of resources, but some is due to a lack of accessible tools and techniques as well as a lack of consensus on application use beyond first adopters. Many cataloging systems do not generate linked data, and few make data available as linked open data. Research libraries, by ARL White Paper on Wikidata: Opportunities and Recommendations