...
| Table of Contents | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
...
Linked Data for Libraries: LD4L Labs – Creating, Discovering, and Understanding Library Linked Data
January 15, 2016
Summary
The Linked Data for Libraries: LD4L Labs proposal is a collaboration of Cornell, Harvard, Iowa, and Stanford to continue to advance the use and usefulness of linked data in libraries. Project team members will create and assemble tools, ontologies, services, and approaches that use linked data to improve the discovery, use, and understanding of scholarly information resources. The goal is to pilot tools and services and to create solutions that can be implemented in production at research libraries within the next three to five years. The project team will develop tools and provide direct support for projects within the related LD4P Program as described in a grant proposal from Stanford University Libraries. This proposal seeks $1,500,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the period from April 1, 2016 through March 31, 2018 to support this work.
Scope
The LD4L Labs project is focused on developing new tools and approaches that will make it easier for libraries to create and use Linked Open Data that describes their scholarly information resources. The project will develop and support tools for linked data creation and editing, the bulk conversion of existing metadata to linked data, and a common system to support initial work in entity resolution and reconciliation. The project will also explore strategies to use linked data relationships and analysis of the Linked Open Data graph to directly improve discovery and understanding of relevant scholarly information resources. Finally, the project will provide feedback to the library ontology community about the use of BIBFRAME and other relevant ontologies within the tools being developed and in support of discovery and understanding.
...
The projects propose close collaboration, with frequent joint meetings and two shared staff positions that will devote different parts of their effort to the two grants. In addition, tools being developed by LD4L Labs will be directly used in the metadata production work of some of the LD4P partners. Conversely, the LD4P linked data and use cases will also directly inform the development of LD4L tools. Details of these collaborations are discussed in the individual sections below.
A. Background
In the initial Mellon-funded Linked Data for Libraries project[1], the LD4L team gathered data, assembled an ontology, and built some of the basic infrastructure to share linked data about scholarly information resources, such as traditional monograph and journal publications, archival materials, research datasets, images, recordings, cultural artifacts, newspapers and magazines, web archives, and much more. This infrastructure included the creation of a shared processing pipeline that converts existing MARC[2] catalog records at the three partner institutions to linked data, together with pre- and post-processing steps to make this linked data more useful and uniform across the partners.
...
The use of standardized and reconciled linked data representations for scholarly information resources across all the partner institutions allows these resources to be treated as one comprehensive collection. Having such a common collection means that tools, relationships with and analysis of the linked data graph, and new linked data sources can and will build on the scholarly information resources from all the partner institutions, not just on resources from a single institution. This approach also means that the tools and approaches being developed will be reusable, and allow inclusion of resources from any institution that makes information available as compatible Linked Open Data. Through linked data, alignment to shared identifiers by any institution also means that references to external entities, including global identifiers for people, organizations, concepts, events, places, and other types, will enrich much more than that single institution's data.
B. Rationale
The first Linked Data for Libraries project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in January 2014, presented an extensive discussion of the importance of linked data and semantic web technologies for making scholarly information resources at academic libraries more discoverable, understandable, and usable[15]. That discussion will not be repeated here, but it is important to note that since that proposal was funded, there has been growing interest in and use of linked data by the library, archives, and museum community, as reflected in many workshops, conference presentations, and publications.
...