I would love to see a "Wiki-bibliography" - where we could gather things like reading lists from courses, and where people can put annotated bibliographies on topics. I'm not exactly sure how it would work -- would there be one bibliography per topic? Or could everyone add their own bibliography? (Then we get back into the "personal lists" problem.)
Having done a fair amount of reading in library discussions of the 19th century, it is clear that the library catalog was primarily a "find it in this library" tool and subject access was often conducted through authoritative bibliographies. (Also see Thomas Mann's essay on research at the Library of Congress. [1]) This goes beyond categorization to: here are the key books/resources in this topic. Reading lists / bibliographies could be developed for different audiences and learning levels. I suspect that this will work better for the humanities than some of the fast-moving sciences, but I think it could be very useful.
Anyway, that's my dream.
p.s. There once was a publication called "books for college libraries" that I wanted to run against the large University of California union catalog to surface the basic books in each subject area. Something like this would be very helpful.
kc [1] http://www2.hawaii.edu/~donnab/lis605/Peloponnesian_War_future_of_cataloging...
On 3/27/20 12:35 PM, Andy Mabbett wrote:
On Fri, 27 Mar 2020 at 19:05, Karen Coyle kcoyle@kcoyle.net wrote:
How can we create useful collections from these online materials?
The Wikimedia ecosystem gives us a number of tools that can be used for this, including
Wikisource, where works can be transcribed, and categorised
Wikidata where the metadata can be stored, checked and improved; and
where we can document related identities such as publishers, and authors
- Wikipedia, where we can write list articles, or have them populated
by Wikidata queries; not to mention articles about authors
Wikidata can also be used to populate external tools like Scholia.
Then we have a number of tools on the toolserver, which allow us to crowdsource things like identifier matches, main sujects, and links to authors, and add them to Wikidata