IFLA is pleased to announce that it is receiving a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation as part of the WikiCite project.

The objective of the WikiCite project is to improve citations in Wikimedia projects through the development of open bibliographic data on Wikidata. Wikidata itself is a multilingual, open source repository of structured data and is playing an increasingly large role in supporting Linked Open Data initiatives in libraries.

The grant project is supported by the Wikidata working group and will be used to develop a series of online videos on a variety of topics related to open bibliographic data, digital collections, the support of scholarly communication and scholarly profiles, and the use of Wikimedia projects such as Wikidata, Wikibase, and Wikisource, in the context of libraries.

IFLA’s Wikidata Working group has invited several speakers such as Jason Evans (National Library of Wales) and Simon Cobb (University of Exeter), Ahava Cohen (National Library of Israel), Barbara Fisher and Sarah Hartmann (National Library of Germany), Megan Wacha (City University of New York) and Nicolas Vigneron, to share their knowledge and experiences on freely-licensed videos. The videos will be published with several translations with the possibility of further crowd-sourced translations.

By developing this content, the IFLA Wikidata working group hopes to promote the development of these tools in libraries but also to share practices between library professionals.

The videos will be made available in September.