A Step Forward: Adding Linked Data Vocabularies to Digital Repositories

Abstract

Linked data has been a recent endeavor in the library community and various libraries have experimented with linked data in their traditional library catalog and digital collections. This presentation will review the different linked data practices especially focusing on those related to digital collections in academic libraries, explore the current digital library systems’ capabilities in accommodating linked data and present how linked data vocabularies have been added to the digital repositories at the University of Central Florida (UCF) Libraries. The UCF Libraries have been adding linked data vocabularies to its institutional repository from the Library of Congress’ authority files and the Virtual International Authority File, including personal names such as authors and thesis advisors, corporate names such as university, college and departmental names, subjects as well as person identifiers. This talk will elaborate on the libraries’ working with linked data and provide real examples. It will also discuss how OpenRefine is used to edit and enhance metadata in the cataloging process, including reconciling terms and distinguishing controlled terms from a list of terms selected from the item, adding links to the controlled terms, and cleaning up data. It will further address the benefits and challenges involved in these practices such as the enhancement of contextual information for authors, the difficulty in determining whether the matched name is the right author, limitations of the systems and how linked data can be presented to the users