Documenting Italian Libraries on Wikidata: From Local Projects to a Multilayered National Knowledge Graph

The representation of Italian libraries in Wikidata has grown through two major data imports. In 2020, under commission from Tuscany region, the Sistema Cultura Toscana dataset was uploaded, raising the number of Italian libraries from fewer than 500 to 1,322 and documenting the methodology of this first large-scale project. A second step followed in 2022 with the addition of 11,239 entries from the ICCU Italian Libraries Database. This process involved merging CC0 datasets, entity alignment, and addressing gaps between the web versions of databases and their dumps. Together, these efforts illustrate both achievements and challenges in enriching Wikidata’s coverage of Italian libraries, specifically highlighting the role of iterative, human-curated workflows in large-scale data imports.