The use of Wikidata was a deliberate choice. As of 2024, Wikidata is the largest multilingual knowledge graph on the web, comprising over 100 million entities. Wikidata offers a free, user-friendly platform that welcomes the contributions of all, enabling the project to connect with potentially unknown sources of information. Linking entities described in African American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography to Wikidata adds additional context to the names, places, and publications described in the bibliography by linking it to data already in Wikidata, enables users to more easily trace the name changes ubiquitous to this type of resource, and transforms the African American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography from a traditional print bibliographic index into a Collections as Data resource.

This resource is linked to data from existing cataloging efforts, digital projects, and reference resources that have worked to surface rare Black newspapers, periodicals, and other Black print culture resources such as Chronicling America’s African American Newspapers collection, licensed databases such as Accessible Archives’ African American Newspapers, Readex’s African American Newspapers and Periodicals, and ProQuest’s African American Newspapers, as well as digital humanities projects such as Colored Conventions and Black Bibliography.