An essential guide to linked data for libraries, archives and museums
Facet Publishing have announced the release of Linked Data for Cultural Heritage
In this new book Ed Jones and Michele Seikel along with a stellar list of contributors help readers understand linked data concepts by examining practice and projects based in libraries, archives, and museums.
Linked open data remains very much a work in progress, and much of the progress has taken place within the domain of the cultural heritage institutions. There is no question that the structure of linked data, and the machine inferencing it supports, shows great promise for discoverability. What will be the ‘killer app’ that breaks linked open data out to the wider world and accelerates its uptake? Perhaps it will be a project described in this volume.
The editors of the book said, “while we are still some distance from the world of linked data that Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila envisaged fifteen years ago when they first proposed a Semantic Web, this book provides a snapshot in time of the current linked data landscape among libraries and other cultural institutions – many very large datasets have now been made available as RDF, and the SPARQL query language enables sophisticated queries across datasets.”
The book examines projects including Europeana, the Digital Public Library of America, OCLC’s use of Schema.org and the development of the BIBFRAME data model and discusses how to migrate from a MARC to a linked data environment, how controlled vocabularies integrate with linked data and the role of authority control, identifiers and vocabularies including Web Ontology Language (OWL).
Ed Jones has been cataloguing serials, on and off, since 1976, and over the years has authored several scholarly papers and made numerous presentations on serials cataloguing, the FRBR and FRAD conceptual models, and RDA. He has been a member of the CONSER Operations Committee, on and off, since 1981, and recently served as an RDA advisor. In 1995, he received his doctorate in library and information science from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He is currently associate director for assessment and technical services at National University in San Diego.
Michele Seikel is a tenured professor and cataloguing librarian on the library faculty at Oklahoma State University. She has published several research papers in peer-reviewed technical services journals. In ALA, she has co-chaired the Cataloging Norms Interest Group and the Cataloging and Metadata Management Section’s Policy and Planning Committee. Currently, she chairs the ALCTS Planning Committee.
If you would like to receive monthly eBulletins from Facet Publishing join the mailing list below.
Facet Publishing 
One comment