The New Zealand Thesis Project: Connecting a Nation’s Dissertations Using Wikidata

Introduction: Libraries hold large amounts of bibliographic data, with great potential for enrichment with linked open data. The New Zealand Thesis Project explored this potential by uploading thesis metadata records from New Zealand institutional repositories to Wikidata, a collaborative linked data knowledge base. Description of Project: Nine New Zealand tertiary institutions collaborated with four Wikidata experts to upload a combined national dataset of doctoral and master’s theses. Thesis records, including author and advisor names and richly described with main subject statements, were extracted from each repository, combined, and data cleaned before being uploaded to Wikidata. The team then undertook additional data enrichment, round-tripped Wikidata’s QID identifiers back to individual repositories, and used the new records to cite theses on authors’ Wikipedia pages. Wikidata queries and other visualizations were created to demonstrate how connecting the thesis metadata to records for authors, advisors, institutions, and subjects allows new insights into our collections. Next Steps: Documentation is being fine-tuned to support future similar projects, and a second combined upload is under discussion to continue growing the New Zealand Thesis Project. There is considerable scope to continue enriching Wikidata records, some of which is already underway by Wikidata volunteers.