ORCID Archives — Andy Mabbett, aka pigsonthewing.
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0000-0001-5882-6823
I remember fondly my first unconference,
UKLocalGovCamp, in Birmingham in 2009
. It really was life-changing for me; the way it opened my eyes to the possibilities of disruptive innovation was the catalyst for me eventually becoming a freelancer. I made many long-standing friends, makers and activists inside and outside local government, there, too.
Since then I’ve attended many more, and have run or facilitated a good number of unconferences, and unconference-style sessions within more traditional types of events. If I say so myself, it’s something I’m good at, and I certainly enjoy it.
So I was pleased, last Saturday, to be able to spend the day in London to attend, and help to facilitate, HASLibCamp, an unconference for librarians in the field of Health and Science. That’s a relatively narrow focus, and so the event wasn’t as big as some I’ve been to, but in no way did that diminish the quality of the sessions, nor the participants’ enthusiasm.
After housekeeping and introductions on behalf of our host, the Department of Library & Information Science at London City University (CityLIS), I asked for a few shows-of-hands, and quickly determined that we had been joined by academic, commercial, hospital and public librarians, and archivists, as well as some student librarians.
I then explained how unconferences work, and invited any of them who wanted to, to give a thirty-second “pitch” for a session in which they wanted to participate, or a topic they wished to discuss.
Luckily, we had just the right number of pitches for the rooms and timeslots available, leaving two gaps after lunch, which were filled during the day with follow-up sessions. A “chill out” room was also avaialable, as was space for ad-hoc discussions and meetings.
The pitched sessions.
I pitched two sessions, one on
ORCID identifiers
(what they are, and how librarians can help to embed them in their organisations), and another – in response to a request received before the event – on Wikipedia, Wikidata and
my work as a Wikimedian in Residence
I also attended a session on what public libraries might learn about giving healthcare information, from academic libraries. Several resources were mentioned and are linked in the Storify reporting (see below). My final session was billed as being about understanding customer needs, and took the form of a lateral-thinking exercise.
Here’s a brief roundup of coverage elsewhere:
Storify
Suzannah Bridge
Lyn Robinson
(CityLIS)
Emma Illingworth
(Librarians on the loose)
I’m grateful to the
Consortium of Independent Health Libraries in London
(CHILL) for sponsoring my attendance at the event (a condition of which was that this blog post be written).
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0000-0001-5882-6823
Further to my previous post on
finding ORCID identifiers used in Wikidata & Wikipedia
Magnus Manske
has released another useful gadget. “
Wikidata BEACON
” is a new tool that matches individuals’ (or other subjects’) entries in two different authority control systems. One of these, of course, can be
ORCID
For example to find people who are listed in
Wikidata
, and have an ORCID identifier recorded there, and who also have, say, a VIAF identifier, or a MusicBrainz artist profile, choose one of those properties, then the other, from the two drop down menus, then select “Get BEACON data”.
Screenshot of Beacon, with ORCID and VIAF identifiers selected.
The result is returned as a pipe (“
“)-separated list, with the middle of the three columns being the Wikidata ID (in the format “
Qnnn
“) of the item concerned. (For the technically inclined, the format is
BEACON
, used to enable third party data re-users to automate the conversion of identifier values into web links. You can see the part-URLs, to which the values must be appended, at the head of the results page, labelled
#PREFIX
and
#TARGET
So,
Bill Thompson
, for instance, appears as:
4426461|Q4911143|0000-0003-4402-5296
showing respectively, his VIAF (
4426461
), Wikidata (
Q4911143
), and ORCID (
0000-0003-4402-5296
) identifiers
A query can also be made in the form of a URL, for example this one:
in which “
496
” is from Wikidata’s code for an ORCID identifier and “
214
” for a VIAF identifier.
Another example is:
which shows the identifiers of chemicals in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s
ChemSpider database
and the matching
Wikimedia Commons
categories.
Similarly:
matches the BBC and Internet Movie Database (IMDb) identifiers of television programmes.
Beacon is a good illustration of the way in which Wikidata has become a hub linking disparate datasets about people, and other things; as described by Andrew Gray in “
Wikidata identifiers and the ODNB – where next?
“.
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0000-0001-5882-6823
As you may know, I’m was
appointed Wikipedian in Residence
at
ORCID
in June this year.
I’ve previously written a
guide to using ORCID identifiers in Wikipedia
A new tool, ‘
Resolver
‘, by my friend
Magnus Manske
, who has awesome coding skills, and is generous with them, allows you to find whether a particular ORCID identifier is used in
Wikidata
(and thus in one or more Wikipedia projects, in any language).
By entering the property “
P496
” (the Wikidata property for an ORCID ID) and the ORCID ID value (the short form, e.g. “0000-0003-4402-5296”, not the full identifier, “http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4402-5296”) into Resolver, the relevant Wikidata page, if any, is retuned. At the foot of that page are links to Wikipedia articles (again, if any).
An ORCID identifier query in Resolver
Alternatively, you may compile a URL in the format
– which will automagically redirect.
Note that this works for articles, but not identifiers used on Wikipedia editors’ user pages, which have no Wikidata equivalent.
Resolver works with other unique identifiers, too, such as
VIAF
, or
BBC Your Paintings artist identifiers
, and many more. If you want to know why that’s important, see Andrew Gray’s post, “
Wikidata identifiers and the ODNB – where next?
“. Resolver is not just for people, though. It will also resolve unique identifiers for other types of subjects, such as
BBC programme IDs
or
ChemSpider IDs
for chemical compounds.
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0000-0001-5882-6823
I’m pleased to announce that I have accepted the position of
Wikimedian in Residence
with the
Royal Society of Chemistry
(RSC), a learned society and professional body whose roots go back to 1841 (see
RSC on Wikipedia
).
Over the next year, starting 22 September, I will be helping my new RSC colleagues, and the Society’s members, to understand Wikipedia and its
sister projects
, and to contribute to making knowledge of chemistry, and related subjects, more freely available. The job is titled “Wiki
edian”, because as well as Wiki
edia, it covers those other projects, which are run by the Wikimedia community.
Trainees hard at work at a previous RSC editathon, in
Burlington House’s library, at which I volunteered as a trainer.
This follows on from my previous Wikipedia residences with Wildscreen (
on their ARKive project
),
with Staffordshire Archives and Heritage Service
at the New Art Gallery Walsall
, and with Lancashire County Council’s Museum Service (
at their Queen Street Mill
), plus shorter projects with a number of other institutions (including West Midlands Police, The Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Black Country Museum, and more). I’ll continue to be
Wikipedian in Residence at ORCID
. The RSC have
already integrated ORCID
into their publishing workflow and the two organisations obviously share interests in research and academic publishing.
I’ll be working part time, partly from home, and at the RSC’s Cambridge base one day per week, plus travelling around the UK to various events. I’ll also enjoy spending some days at their palatial London HQ, at
Burlington House
. My work days will vary to suit the requirements of the post, and my other commitments.
The rest of the time, I’ll still be available, as a freelancer, for other work, not least relating to Wikipedia, and facilitating open space events (for example, I’m MCing
GalleryCamp
on 23 September). Do drop me a line if you think I can help you with that, or if you have an interest in my RSC work, or if you want to meet socially, after work, in Cambridge.
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0000-0001-5882-6823
ORCID
, the “Open Research Contributor ID”, is an identifier for contributors to academic papers, journals, and other publications. It’s the equivalent, for such people, of an ISBN for a book or a DOI for a paper. ORCID is an open data project, run by a not-for-profit foundation.
I’ve been working with ORCID for over a year, on their “
works metadata working group
“, as an
outreach ambassador
, and
integrating ORCID into Wikipedia and Wikidata
(link is a PDF).
I’m currently at the
ORCID outreach event
at the University of Illinois in Chicago, USA, and participating in
the codefest
(a hackathon by another name).
I came up with the idea for a plugin for WordPress, which would allow authors to add their ORCID identifier to their profile, and which would allow users to add their ORCIDs to comments.
Roy Boverhof
(kindly sponsored by Elsevier) has kindly coded it (it’s his first WordPress plugin!); I’ve installed it; and used it on this post; so you can see my ORCID “0000-0001-5882-6823”) above, and Roy’s in his comment.
If you have an ORCID, please leave a comment here, and include it in the field provided.
The plugin is very much in beta mode (its not yet tested in multiple browsers, for instance; and we need to add documentation and additional functionality such as check-digit validation), but you can get it from
Roy’s GitHub repository
(there’s a “download zip” button on the right hand side, in the default view) and install it on any self-hosted WordPress installation using Plugins > Add New. (If upgrading from a previous version, please delete the original first.)
Your feedback will be welcome, in comments below, as will code contributions at GitHub.
Thanks, Roy!
Update, 2014-05-22
: There were prizes for the best product; all of them were great, but we came second!
Update, 2014-05-28
: New version, with various improvements. Please delete the old version before installing the new one, per the above (revised) instructions.
Update, 2014-05-28b
: And again! Now at version 0.5
Update, 2025-12-22
: Yes, that’s right—after more than a decade, there is new version, 1.0, with significant improvements, new features and updates. As always, see Roy’s GitHub repository for details and to download the file (the link is now hidden behind GitHub’s “Code” button), and install as described above.
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