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Libraries have survived in their current environment by adhering to structural and data quality standards to facilitate the easy exchange of metadata for commonly held resources. These standards also allowed metadata from various institutions to be quickly combined into large discovery interfaces. As libraries transition from their current environment to a much more complex one based in LOD, these standards must be rethought and re-envisioned. Their need is still as strong but their expression is unclear. Since its inception, BIBFRAME has been used in a number of individual projects both within the United States and internationally. For instance, the University College London Department of Information Studies has been awarded a grant to develop a Linked Open Data bibliographic dataset based on BIBFRAME. The Library of Alexandria will focus on the conversion process for data in the Arabic language. The National Library of Medicine has developed a more modular approach to the BIBFRAME vocabulary by paring down the existing vocabulary to its core concepts (BIBFRAME-Lite). We now have arrived at the point where these individual efforts should be drawn together to create the common environment, standards, and protocols that have allowed libraries to interact so strongly in the past. And by expressing relationships in a standard way so that machines can understand the meaning inherent in them, the heart of the semantic web, library’s data will finally be able to be embedded into the Web.
Rationale
In order to address these address these issues, Stanford University proposed a planning grant to the Mellon Foundation in 2014 called Linked Data for Production (LD4P). The planning grant proposed two meetings to define and organize a series of projects that would begin the transition to the native creation of linked data in a library’s production environment. The core members of LD4P are Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, the Library of Congress, Princeton, and Stanford. The outcome of those meetings was a report submitted to the Mellon Foundation in July of 2015. The group had a final meeting recently at the Library of Congress to formalize its plans.
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