The Metadata Discussion Group is officially on summer hiatus! In the meantime, we’ll be posting occasional new items. If you have some news to pass along, send us a note.
Uche Ogbuji (@uogbuji) is Partner and Chief Technology Officer of Zepheira. He’s been writing about his work on the LibHub Initiative at the Denver Public Library (DPL). His posts include preliminary observations regarding the impact of converting a library database to published linked data–
Denver Public Library Data Pilot Release
Early progress on Denver Public Library / #visiblelibrary
LibHub aims to use BIBFRAME and Schema.org to make it easier for web crawlers to discover library resources and send users to library websites/catalogs.
When I look at the DPL LibHub “record” for Giraffes, black dragons, and other pianos, I can see that the data is being published on the web as BIBFRAME and Schema.org. If you want to see the markup, hit CTRL+U in your browser then do a find (CTRL+F) for “bf:” and “schema”. You’ll see PURLs. You’ll see some Dublin Core. And lots of something called http://bibfra.me/vocab/lite/ (which is best addressed in a separate post). What you won’t see? Access points (author, subjects, etc.) being associated with their identifiers, such as the Library of Congress Linked Data Service or VIAF. I’d guess that more robust linking is in the works. In any case, it’s good to see more examples of linked library data services being launched.
At this point, I’m fairly certain that only MARC data was used to populate the DPL LibHub dataset (I trust, dear Internet, that you’ll correct me if I’m wrong). DPL uses ContentDM to host their digital collections but I haven’t found any evidence that ContentDM Dublin Core records were included in the conversion. If you find a record from the DPL digital repository in the DPL LibHub dataset, let us know in the comments.
So, do libraries launch datasets on their own in the future? Do we pay for a service to host our data for us? I like the CC-BY license because it requires attribution (metadata provenance is going to be a bigger deal in the LOD world)–is this the way to go? I kept enclosing the word “record” in quotation marks. What do we call the “record” in the linked data environment. Data view?