Dear Wikidata Community,

As anticipated at the PCC Virtual Participants meeting on February 15, the Program for Cooperative Cataloging is launching a new Entity Management Cooperative (EMCO) program in 2025. For those of you outside of the library community, this program is an attempt to bring entity management across the semantic web that interacts with library metadata under a single umbrella within the Program for Cooperative Cataloging, or PCC. We are inviting individuals from communities using registries such as Wikidata to participate in this work on a volunteer basis.

EMCO is designed to function in parallel with the PCC’s NACO (Name Authority Cooperative) and SACO (Subject Authority Cooperative) programs. There are many more entities in our bibliographic data than are currently receiving entries in the Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF). Identifiers are vital to support discovery in linked data environments and the PCC envisions EMCO as being an alternative for creating and maintaining entity identifiers in a linked data environment.

All individuals are invited to participate in the EMCO Early Adopters Phase, regardless of their institutional affiliation with the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC). If you would like to be a part of EMCO at this “Early Adopters” phase, particularly if you previously participated in the PCC’s ISNI or Wikidata pilots, we invite you to let us know by filling out a brief form at https://forms.gle/fPpjXfUNEJ5jtpro9 by Friday, January 17, 2025.

If you have questions not covered in the EMCO Wiki, please let us know.

Best Regards,

Crystal Yragui, MLIS

she/her

Wikidata User:Clements.UWLib

Co-Chair, PCC Identity Management Advisory Committee (IMAC)

Co-Interim Head, Metadata & Cataloging Initiatives Unit

Metadata Librarian

Cataloging and Metadata Services Department

University of Washington Libraries

Seattle, WA 98195

cec23@uw.edu