Unveil hidden gems: Improving discoverability of Ming Qing Women Poets and their poetry works through Wikidata

Traditionally, special collections featuring cultural heritage materials, and related authority data on authors and works, have been created using conventional cataloging standards with limited data interoperability. To increase accessibility and visibility of Chinese cultural heritage data, a group of Chinese American librarians created the Wikidata:WikiProject Chinese Culture and Heritage in 2020. This project utilized Wikidata's Linked Open Data (LOD) platform to create, share, and reuse data. Specifically, the project members added and enriched entries over 4,000 poets and 160 poetry works in Wikidata. By using Wikidata SPARQL service and its visualization tools, the project succeeded in visualizing the relationships between various entities, such as poets, places, and works, and generating graph views for women poets' biological information. This poster presentation aims to provide an overview of the project, highlighting the challenges faced and how the LOD approach contributed to better information discovery for cultural heritage collections. Additionally, this poster will demonstrate the project's impact, showcase its achievements, and outline future plans. As evidence of its success, the project received Special Recognition in 2022 as part of the Chinese American Librarians Association's 50th Anniversary CALASYS Grant and has garnered positive feedback from the community.