already included information describing audiences and creators of resources (including demographic groups), but the format of the strings was not always clear to users in search results. With the use of LCDGT, there could be more precision in search results by faceted displays using these terms in the catalog, and clarity in the descriptions of the resources for users. Similarly, Wikipedia contains many lists of individuals in various demographic groups, o en associated with a profession. Many of the Wikipedia lists correspond with the nine categories of the LCDGT vocabulary, one of which is ethnicity/ culture, which may indicate an agreement on what categories are useful between the two systems.
From 2017 to 2019, the authors led a project to examine the degree of agreement between the Wikipedia List of African-American writers (Wikipedia contributors, 2020a) and Library of Congress criteria for determining if a creator would be considered appropriate for description using the LCDGT term African Americans. For the project, African American history subject expert Trumaine Mitchell found that there was a high level of agreement between individuals on the Wikipedia list and those whose resources might be described as being authored by an African American by the LCDGT criteria (Willey and Yon, 2019). From that project, additional lessons were learned about differences in the structure of information between Wikipedia (especially Wikipedia lists) and traditional (MARC) library cataloging.
At the time, the principal investigators were researching the degree of agreement between Library of Congress criteria and decisions by Wikipedia editors as to which writers could be considered members of the demographic group African American. The possibility of using Wikidata or Wikipedia lists updated by bots such as Listeria to populate catalog search results was not considered during this research in favor of determining if the LCDGT criteria led to the same conclusions as those reached by Wikipedia editors. If there had been disagreement, that would have been a warning flag against integrating the two platforms; however, thankfully there was not. As this article reflects lessons learned during this project, there is limited discussion of Wikidata, although it represents a wealth of possibilities for additional research.
