Bridging the Gaps: Integrating Bibliographic Metadata Into Wikidata for Literary Corpora

This paper presents a case study on enhancing literary-corpus metadata by integrating large-scale bibliographic resources with Wikidata. Digital libraries such as Project Gutenberg or HathiTrust often provide only minimal metadata (e.g., author name and title). For large-scale literary analysis, however, it is crucial to include additional information such as year of publication, author gender, genre, or publisher. Conversely, using Wikidata to enrich existing literary-corpus metadata is challenging, as significant gaps in coverage remain. In this case study, we draw on the metadata of a large literary corpus to address these gaps. We conduct a feasibility analysis to determine how a workflow can be established that integrates metadata from bibliographic catalogues into Wikidata as a step in the digital-humanities pipeline. We explore both procedural approaches and existing software tools and discuss resulting challenges and limitations. Our methods are documented and open-source; the full Python scripts and data processing workflows are publicly available on GitHub.1 The goal is to develop reproducible methods for sharing and improving metadata availability across open platforms.