Cultural heritage materials – particularly those representing marginalized communities – often lack authoritative metadata due to systemic biases in library cataloging. Traditional reconciliation tools like OpenRefine depend on unstable third-party VIAF services and centralized library workflows, creating barriers for independent researchers, activists, and small GLAM institutions. This presentation introduces a lightweight but powerful Python workflow that leverages Zotero’s API to bridge this gap through three key innovations: (1) direct VIAF AutoSuggest API integration that bypasses unreliable proxies, (2) role-aware reconciliation for authors, editors and translators with provenance tracking in Zotero’s Extra field (e.g., “VIAF (Translator):123456|Wikidata:Q789”), and (3) a human-in-the-loop design that prioritizes researcher judgement for contested metadata – especially critical for non-Latin scripts and oral tradition knowledge systems.
The workflow addresses three persistent challenges in authority control: First, it eliminates the CSV export/import bottleneck of OpenRefine by operating natively within Zotero. Second, it uses Wikidata as a crowdsourced gateway to VIAF, enabling immediate contributions from researchers without library affiliations. Third, it implements tiered reconciliation: automated exact matches, user-validated fuzzy matches, and Wikidata fallbacks for wholly new entities. A case study with Afro-Latin American writers’ texts demonstrates how this method successfully captured 22% more contributor identities than traditional library processing.
Attendees will learn: (1) how to implement the script, (2) ethical frameworks for decentralizing authority work while respecting cultural protocols, and (3) integration strategies with existing library systems.
To register your participation in this workshop click on the “Going” button above. You will then receive an email notification as soon as facilitators post an update. Watch out to not register for two parallel workshops.
With our workshop just a few days away, I’m excited to give you a quick introduction to the tool we’ll be exploring: the Zotero-VIAF Reconciler. This is a lightweight bridge between your personal research in Zotero and the vast, interconnected world of open knowledge on Wikidata and the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF).
To ensure we can dive straight into this workflow on Monday, please take a moment to do a few things beforehand.
First, get your Zotero credentials ready. You’ll need to create an API key in your Zotero account settings; we’ll need this for the tool to communicate with your library. Under Applications, create a new key with these permissions:
Library access: Read/Write
Notes: Read/Write
Tags: Read/Write
Second, set up your Wikidata account. If you haven’t edited Wikidata before, this is a great time to create an account and perhaps make a small test edit to get familiar with the platform. This account is our gateway to not only reconciling data but also contributing back, especially for those cultural mediators—translators, editors, lesser-known authors—who are often missing from these global databases.
Finally, think strategically about what you want to reconcile. The tool works in batches, so consider prioritizing a specific collection or a set of authors. This is where the tool truly shines: in identifying and correctly linking those hard-to-find contributors, making their roles in the scholarly record more visible.
This workflow is a step toward making your research practice itself a source of rich, open metadata. If you’re curious about the potential applications, the MOREL project (morelrep.github.io)—for which this reconciler was conceived—showcases one example: how this linked data can be used to build and share dynamic digital collections directly from a Zotero library.
I look forward to seeing you on Monday and exploring how we can make our research more connected, powerful, and visible together.
To register your participation in this workshop click on the “Going” button above. You will then receive an email notification as soon as facilitators post an update. Watch out to not register for two parallel workshops.