the OCLC Research blog
Introduction Since entering the library world, I’ve been fascinated by the substream of uber-geeks which are the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) nerds. It was the enthusiastic and technical-leaning banter of …
Read MoreInfoboxes for a long time were Wikipedias’ way of storing data, and Wikidata is set to replace that techonlogy, with added bonuses like inter-language sharing. To get to that promise …
Read MoreThere is a main distinction in links to different online databases – that of opacity. In the case that the URI gives you an indication as to its contents, that …
Read MoreNow that VIAFbot has finished importing VIAF IDs into Wikidata, I wanted to demonstrate what kind of work could be done with those connections. In March, using Wikidata, I investigated …
Read MoreLast week I wrote about the ‘rope bridge’ between Wikidata and VIAF, and the new research it would afford. Today I bring you a sample of that research. I am …
Read MoreYou may recall that our Wikipedia reciprocal linking robot “VIAFbot” finished adding Authority Control to more than a quarter of a million (English language) Wikipedia articles, but what was the …
Read MoreWikipedia has its own data-structure in templates with parameters — if you are not familiar with Wikipedia templates, an example is “infoboxes,” which show up as fixed-format tables in the …
Read MoreShortly after reaching the 1/4 million edits milestone VIAFbot finished linking Wikipedia biography articles to VIAF.org. Examining the bot’s logs reveals telling statistics about the landscape of Authorities on Wikipedia. …
Read MoreIt’s been traditional recently to hold Wikipedia Loves Libraries events during Open Access Week, and I fully support the practice. What’s also been traditional, in a way that I wanted …
Read MoreAs we all know, the best you can hope of a meeting is not a conclusion, but a chuckle at a statistical oddity. When OCLC’s Top Library Loans List came …
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