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Connecting library metadata with linked data 'in the wild' is a central goal of the LD4L project. To that end much of the ontology team's work has focused on identifying external authorities, stable identifiers (preferably URIs), and sources and services capable of linking the people, places, organizations, events, and subject headings in library metadata to real world entities. In some cases existing metadata in both MARC and non-MARC metadata includes references to local or external authorities, but the vast majority of potentially identifiable entities are represented only as strings of characters. Some of our catalog records have been linked to Library of Congress, OCLC (including the VIAF international authority file), or ISNI identifiers through contracts or internal record enhancement projects, and an unrelated project at Harvard has focused on entity recognition within Encoded Archival Description (EAD) collections. A need to extend from authority file links or a registry of named entities to resolvable URIs compatible with linked data has motivated several LD4L investigations, with some focusing on quality and others more on the efficacy of existing services.
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