Linked Data for Librarians

Linked Data Roadmap for Librarians

• First of all: be open to change but also realistic.
  • Do not expect miracles and be aware of IT fashion hypes.
• Focus on the low hanging fruits.
  • Clean, link, and enrich your metadata.
• Prepare for a bumpy road!
  • Continuously train yourself as standards, methods and tools evolve.

Realize the complexity

To most library staff, Linked Data seems complicated. That’s because it is.

BIBFLOW project, 2017

Be aware of people yelling Let’s get into the Linked Data cloud! These ten modules help to develop a more critical understanding of both the possibilities and the limitations.

Start cleaning!

Regardless whether Linked Data will be a success or a failure, focus on what everyone should be doing: clean your metadata!

With the help of OpenRefine and these modules, you can become the deminer of metadata quality issues in your library.

As a freelance consultant, data quality audits can be a good way to find extra job opportunities.

BIBFRAME’s opportunities

Traditional cooperative cataloguing practices, focused on co-creating records, can shift towards a more granular level.

This flexibility would allow for example to integrate more easily new formats or new types of information such as book reviews or cover art.

However, we can’t start from scratch…

BIBFRAME’s implementation

Bringing legacy MARC data into the BIBFRAME format is not a straightforward process.

Don’t expect shiny products from Zepheira or Ex Libris to do all of the difficult work in an automated manner.

Start experimenting with MARC2BIBFRAME2, the conversion tool developed by LoC.

BIBFRAME’s issues

Switching to BIBFRAME will require extensive training for cataloguers.

Conversion process from MARC to BIBFRAME2 with LoC tools hold the danger of loosing locally defined MARC fields.

Correctly mapping metadata between the Work and Instance level proves difficult.

BIBFRAME’s unknown territories

For the moment, OCLC and LoC are the key entities issuing authority files. How will this situation evolve over time?

It is painful that no one is able to propose a real-life example of how end-users will actually benefit from Linked Data through increased discoverability.

Hosting and querying large-scale triplestores remains challenging—talk about REST and decentralisation or federation with your IT colleagues!

Keep on educating yourself

Mailing list such as the one on BIBFRAME are an excellent source of information.

Don’t hesitate to cross borders to other fields such as data curation or digital humanities to discover relevant methods and tools.

For example, the Programming Historian offers a large collection of tutorials for librarians working in research libraries who wish to help library patrons explore digital corpora.

Get in touch and reuse our materials!

• Interactive slides
  • Comments or questions in regards to the content?
  • On each slide, you will find the possibility to tweet to us and engage with other participants!
• Reuse the content
  • The content of these modules can be freely downloaded from GitHub. We would be happy to hear from you how you reuse the content in your own classes or workshops.