Sunday, August 20, 2017

#Wikidata - Martin Reints and {{Authority control}}

Martin Reints received the Herman Gorter Award in 1993. There is a Wikipedia article about him and consequently he was known in Wikidata. There was no "authority control" information for Mr Reints in Wikidata yet and this was quickly remedied.

The most interesting part is that the VIAF registration for Mr Reints already included a link to Wikidata. Proof perfect that librarians are actively working on keeping their house in order. There was an Open Library entry for Mr Reints and the Dutch article had a link to the DBNL-website for Dutch language authors.

Open Library I found is very much about books. Their data on the books they have is great; identifiers like ISBN-10 or ISBN-13 and links to the online catalog of the Library of Congress. This makes a lookup at the OCLC for identifiers of all the authors easy and disambiguation becomes more effective.

Wikidata is very much about data. You can query Wikidata for all the winners of the Herman Gorter Award and it the results you can add the links to VIAF or to the Open Library. This ability to query makes all kinds of applications possible like: "what books written by authors who won the Nobel Prize are available in your library?"
Thanks,
      GerardM

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