Enriching Wikidata with AuthorityBox

An interview with Stefano Bargioni

As summer 2025 came to an end, we had the pleasure of speaking with the creator of AuthorityBox, a useful tool that interacts with Wikidata toward managing and augmenting bibliographic data in the free, open-source library system software Koha. Born in Genoa, Dottore Stefano Bargioni started out studying physics in his home town but quickly pivoted to information science. For 30 years he has lived in Rome; he’s currently the deputy director of the library system at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, founded in 1984. He has helped that institution to grow and mature, not least by introducing Koha and augmenting it with AuthorityBox.

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Wikimedia Deutschland: Tell me a little bit about your work with library software.

Stefano Bargioni: The most important step has been the adoption of Koha, an open source ILS (integrated library system). The development of services, both on the Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) side and the staff side, were were very important to allow my colleagues to operate the catalogue and add metadata.

We have a lot of interaction with Wikidata during cataloguing, especially when working on authority records. The most important interaction is AuthorityBox on the OPAC side. 

WMDE: What exactly is AuthorityBox?

SB: When working in authority records, users could access the catalogue but didn’t obtain all the information in the authority records. I thought, where could we add this information in OPAC, in Koha?

We wanted a way to show information on the screen containing the detailed display of a bibliographic record.  In Koha, not only are the names of these agents shown as strings, but hidden in the links are the IDs, the identifiers of the authority record. With AuthorityBox you can query directly. Wikidata allows you to make a query, and the result can be directly included in the browser. 

So you obtain this information, and you can build an authority box in the browser. It’s a communication just from the browser to Wikidata, from Wikidata back to the browser — and the information is included on the fly in the bibliographic record. 

WMDE: So AuthorityBox updates Wikidata with this information?

SB: Yes. Let’s say AuthorityBox is installed not only in the OPAC of my library, but also, for instance, over at the Pontifical Institute of Christian Archaeology. If I add to Wikidata an identifier of their corresponding authority record, and I then reconcile the authority of an author with the corresponding property… after two minutes, let’s say, it will appear in the authority box at the Pontifical Institute. The same for my catalogue — somebody else enriches Wikidata, and they create a new link that I can use. I’m working for others, and others are working for me. 

This is a powerful use of Wikidata. Anybody can contribute — if everything is correct, of course — and contribute to your work, to the quality of your catalogue.

WMDE: What need does Koha fill, and what need does AuthorityBox fill?

SB: When we decided to use Koha, I was able to easily install it and to show it to my colleagues, and they immediately said that this is a very simple, a very good interface for cataloguing. We were able to start using it immediately, no training. It was impressive. So we migrated.

AuthorityBox changes how our users — teachers, students — look at the biographical characters. The first comment was, “Wow, interesting, there are pictures of the authors, like on the covers of books!” The second comment was, “Wow, there are dates!” Putting a date with a name tells you, here’s an author that belongs to a certain cultural period. You can immediately exclude that author, or you can decide you want to study them further.  

WMDE: How do tools like AuthorityBox help librarians make contributions to Wikidata?

SB: I think that hiding the complexity of URIs and similar things, even when just copying and pasting, is very important for librarians. They have to understand the importance of using the metadata operation, but they need to operate in a very simple way. The tools are very important. You can’t feel ”$0” and “$1” with your eyes.

But they’re very interested in the effects of linking data. So the cataloguers are becoming “catalinkers”,  as I like to call them. [Ed. note: dott. Bargioni’s wordplay refers to a “catalogatore”, one who simply catalogues, becoming a “catalegatore” — a linker or binder of catalogues.]

My colleagues always look at Wikidata as a tool for their own work, never as a tool managed by others. They see Wikidata as a tool for providing more information about our authors, our teachers — and then a tool to validate the authority control.

We belong to the URBE network, a consortium of libraries. URBE means “Unione Romana Biblioteche Ecclesiastiche” (Union of Roman Ecclesiastical Libraries), 20 libraries using RDA together since 2017. We especially appreciate the “A” in RDA: A for “access”. In the URBE network, we’re doing this kind of authority control, these kinds of operations are going on — and we’re linking each other. Some years ago we started the Parsifal project, a collective catalogue that is entity-based. It’s giving us a lot of experience in management and maintenance, in collections of entities, especially starting from agents. We’re using this new kind of collective catalogue. 

WMDE: What’s coming up in the future that you’re excited about?

SB: One is that Koha is starting to think about supporting BIBFRAME. It won’t be for years, in my opinion, but if MARC is abandoned for BIBFRAME, we’ll have to manage this change.

The second thing would be artificial intelligence — it can’t be stopped in any way. We’ll have to introduce it in reference, in cataloguing, in OPAC, and so on. It’ll be very interesting. It can offer a lot that’s positive — because we have a lot of work that involves just checking, checking, checking.

And one idea more — it would be very difficult for me to do, but I’d like to see somebody adapt AuthorityBox to be a Koha plugin. It would simplify the adoption. People ask me, how can I introduce AuthorityBox to my Koha? It’s not terribly difficult, but it’s a bit complicated. When I speak about it, I have to mention that AuthorityBox is not a Koha plugin.

WMDE: So you’re looking for someone to help?

SB: Yes, it would be very useful.

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Warm thanks to dott. Stefano Bargioni, deputy director of the library at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross and the creator of AuthorityBox for Koha.