Leveraging Wikidata to Enhance Authority Records in the EHRI Portal

Abstract

Abstract This paper will discuss how the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) leveraged Wikidata to expand and enhance its authority records for Holocaust-era camps and ghettos. As an international project integrating descriptions for Holocaust-related archival material held in institutions across the world, EHRI faces challenges in developing name authorities that can be efficiently and effectively applied across multiple languages and various metadata standards. The integration of the EHRI name authorities for camps and ghettos into Wikidata demonstrates how the linked open data capacities of Wikidata can be used to enhance local metadata and expand the reach of that data.