The annual LIBER Award for Library Innovation was instituted by LIBER with the support of OCLC. Every year we recognise the three abstracts which best describe innovative work within the overall theme of each specific LIBER Annual Conference.
The award was originally intended to support the physical participation of awardees, enabling them to travel to the LIBER Conference. Due to our LIBER 2020 Conference (Building Trust with Research Libraries) being shifted online, awardees were not able to make use of their award money to fund their physical participation.
As such, in December 2020, LIBER and OCLC decided to adapt the OCLC Innovation Award to rather fund a project run by the library/institution of the awardees.
2020 Awardees
One of our awardees for 2020 was Alicia Fagerving, Wikimedia Sverige, Sweden, for the paper ‘Wikidata as an open, collaborative bibliographic database: the case of the National Library of Sweden’.
Background of the Awardee
Alicia Fagerving is a developer at Wikimedia Sverige (WMSE), working primarily with Linked Open Data and Wikidata, including a long-standing collaboration with the National Library of Sweden.
WMSE is a non-profit association based in Sweden, working towards making knowledge freely accessible to all humans, especially by supporting the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, such as Wikipedia and Wikidata. To achieve this goal, we collaborate with and support cultural heritage institutions in Sweden and abroad: museums, libraries and others.
Project Description
Throughout 2019 and 2020, WMSE carried out a larger strategic project aimed at exploring and evaluating the possibilities offered by Wikidata for library data, using the National Library of Sweden’s openly licensed datasets as a starting point.
The organisation developed a prototype of a tool to assist Wikidata users in populating the platform with data about books in the National Library’s catalogue. In this project, the team will continue working on this tool so that a usable version can be released and presented to Wikidata’s volunteer community.
How did the Innovation Award make a difference in fulfilling the project?
The Innovation Award will allow WMSE to run a focused sprint to finalise the functionalities and remedy the bugs in their software, with the objective of releasing a working tool that the Wikidata community can implement in their work with bibliographic data.