The reconciliation of SBN authority records with Wikidata. Progresses and perspectives after a decade of work (2013-2023)

Abstract

The article retraces diachronically the history of the reconciliation of Opac SBN’s authority records with Wikidata, from the perspective of the editing activity on Wikidata; the article deals with the creation of the property used in Wikidata to connect to Opac SBN’s name authority file (P396), the progressive growth of the number of values of P396 in Wikidata (compared with the identifiers of other European authority files), the reconciliation strategies that have been adopted and the main difficulties which have slowed down this process, and finally the relevant novelties brought firstly by the adoption of the new Opac SBN and secondly by the recent decisions taken by ICCU in order to promote a greater data openness.

Keywords

• Authority control
• Entity management
• Data reconciliation
• Wikidata
• Opac SBN.