Libraries and librarians in the Covid-19 Wikiproject: authority control, quality content and linked open data

Abstract

Starting from the observation of the reaffirmed centrality that Wikipedia and its sister projects assumed during the Coronavirus pandemic and the lockdown, the article presents the Wikiproject Covid-19, in its dual articulation in Wikipedia and Wikidata. In particular, it analyzes the key role of librarians participating in the project, that they assume thanks to their knowledge in the LIS field and in the standardized description of resources through metadata. After a short international review, the paper reports the specific case of the University Library Center of the University of Salerno, where some librarians have actively contributed to the Wikidata Wikiproject Covid-19. Starting from the technical background acquired with participation in initiatives such as Wikicite or international campaigns such as “#1lib1ref” and from previous experiments, through the combined use of various tools and the creation of a rigorous workflow, the librarians have come to process and integrate thousands of data from Wikidata into quality biomedical databases in a relatively short time. The workflow focused mainly on three activities: the insertion of external unique identifiers for authors and scientific journals, the qualification of the items through the addition of bibliographic references and the subject cataloguing of the scientific articles relating to SARSCoV- 2 and the related world pandemic. Lastly the essay highlights the limits and the critical issues of the semantic web, of the open collaborative projects and of the specific method used, with some considerations on the librarian’s new centrality in the context of open data and on the need to participate in these projects in the in the area of Digital Humanities.