Hi all,I hope you are well.
I would like to ask you if you are aware of any project concerning the collaboration of a National Library with Wikipedia, regarding things as theasuri and authority control.
Last summer,
the National Library of Florence (BNCF) approached Wikimedia Italia for a project of synchronization of the Italian thesaurus (thesaurus del Nuovo Soggettario [1]) with Wikipedia.
They thesaurus linked to Wikipedia, but Wikipedia didn't link back.
We asked the community and then synchronized the links between the Italian Wikipedia and the BNCF Thesaurus (now around 8'000).
The links were later uploaded within a property in Wikidata (see property:P508[2]), and are now recalled automatically by Template:Thesaurus BNCF[3] on it.wikipedia.
Right now, the BNCF would be eager to know if other theasuri had the same idea, as for the multilingual nature of Wikidata it would be "easy" to link thesauri in different languages, per Wikidata.
It is the very same idea that animated the VIAF project: right now, Wikidata contains several identifiers for people and books, being a "super-authority control" (as Max called it :-).
Using Wikidata as a bridge/cross walk would be very important and fairly "cheap": synchronizing 2 different thesauri isn't normally a easy job, but Wikipedias have already done the difficult part.
The BNCF team has been working in the past years to connect other subject authority control lists. At the time being, 4000 tems in Italian thesaurus link to their equivalent LCSH term, and the LSCH linked back in the last weeks, via SKOS/RDF.
The BNCF is doing the same with the French authority control RAMEU [4], from BNF, and the European community one EUROVOC [5].
So, the question is:
are you aware of any project like this? Does your library mantain a thesaurus and aiming to put that on Wikipedia/Wikidata?
Aubrey