2020 LD4 Conference on Linked Data in Libraries

This is a limited capacity session for linked data beginners. To register, you must add this session to your schedule (instructions). By adding this session to your schedule, you are reserving a single spot for yourself only (not a group). Each person needs to sign up individually for this session. This workshop will be largely asynchronous with video/slides, hands-ons exercises, Slack discussions, and “office hours”. It kicks off on Monday July 6th, 2020, but it will continue through the week. Attendees will primarily interact over Slack. Zoom check-ins are optional and will be scheduled after surveying attendees about their availability.

Individuals brought into linked data projects need to understand certain fundamentals in order to navigate the mechanics of linked data and better understand the data itself. These fundamentals and related tooling provide the ability to more easily perform analysis and guide the use of existing linked data. This workshop will introduce attendees to essential RDF and linked data concepts, provide hands-on exercises using select tools and techniques for accessing linked data, and allow for discussions on how this knowledge can be used in the work we do. Outcomes: - A pragmatic understanding of RDF, linked data, and http - The ability to read/write Turtle RDF syntax - Introduction to SPARQL queries (building on the introduction to Turtle syntax) - Ability to access different linked data sources using a limited number of tools (SPARQL endpoints, command line cURL, possibly others) - A network of colleagues and materials to refer back to when related questions come up in the future

Equipment needed: Attendees will need a computer with browsers and cURL installed.
Intended audience: This workshop is for anyone who wishes to participate in a linked data project and needs an introduction to tools for accessing and assessing linked data.
Workshop Support Materials: https://github.com/sfolsom/LD4_2020_Conference_Linked_Data_WorkShop

This session will not be recorded.
The primary focus of this affinity group is to call attention to ethical considerations around ongoing and newly proposed work using Linked Data technologies. A core guiding principle for the group stands on the idea that ethics should be a forethought, not an afterthought of any initiative as a way to not only potentially reduce harm, but to prevent further harm. The group serves as a space for exploration and discussion of the ethical implications (both positive and negative) of linked data and work towards developing a Code of Ethics and toolkit of resources to provide a critical and ethical framework for designing linked data projects. As a relatively new group, members aim to act in an advisory capacity to the LD4 community and beyond.

This session will not be recorded.
The Ethics in Linked Data group hosts this writing workshop to focus on creating a space to work collaboratively on writing projects related to Ethics in Linked Data. Currently, the affinity group is working to submit a book proposal on the subject and would like to carve out space at this year's LD4 conference to bring together members and interested writers. By providing an intentional space for writing, the LD4 conference can serve as a space for critical reflection as well as concrete actions towards community goals. The audience would include current affinity group members as well as anyone interested in exploring writing areas on various topics the group seeks to address.

Presentation slides
Session recording

Linked data, also called Web 3.0, is the practice of structuring information in a way that both computers and humans can easily understand, and it holds revolutionizing potential and implications for libraries, archives, and museums. As institutions from state universities to the National Library of Medicine and the Library of Congress rush to implement and define it, questions of representation and limitations are too often ignored. Avoidance of these questions in Web 1.0 and 2.0 had (and continue to have) dismaying effects. Rather than allow history to repeat itself, minoritized groups have staged an intervention into these new technologies, offering a variety of options for alternative representation and organization. This workshop will offer tangible benefits to newcomers by introducing the work and purpose of linked data, but it will also offer alternative approaches and strategies useful for experts. The presenters—who serve on the board of the international LGBTQ+ linked data vocabulary Homosaurus—will offer a wide range of applications drawing from their work in archives and digital humanities (Watson) and biomedical informatics (Kronk) After an introduction, we will discuss use cases for the Homosaurus in GLAMs (including platforms such as Omeka, Scalar, and MARC) as well as in biomedical research. Next, we will showcase accessing the Homosaurus through the GSSO (Gender, Sex, and Sexual Orientation ontology) and using it for natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as text detection, document classification, and tagging. Finally, we will demonstrate practical uses to linked data by tagging documents available in MEDLINE as well as material from the AIDS History Project collection at UCSF. Throughout, the presenters will discuss around shifting terms and identities, both in the context of clinical medicine and queer history.

Session recording

Share-VDE is a library-driven initiative which brings together the bibliographic catalogues and authority files of a community of libraries in a shared discovery environment based on linked data. Share-VDE expanded its scope to embrace a wider community of institutions also from the art and music domains, building the Share Family. As the Share Family, with Share-VDE, is now going progressively into production connecting the catalogues of libraries in the US, Canada and Europe, new opportunities for cooperation with other projects are arising, like the collaboration with the PCC, the integration with LD4P's Sinopia project or the interconnection with other authoritative sources. This presentation will outline the Share-VDE approach towards other projects and how comparison among different experiences and collaboration can have a positive, concrete, impact for the community. Practical experiences and implementation examples will be shared with all the participants, focussing in particular on the ongoing discussions with Share Family members and external parties around the evolution of the entity models. The presentation will be interesting for anyone involved with linked data in the library, archives and museums domains.

Join the Session by watching the video: YouTube Link
Ask Questions in Slack:  ld4_2020_infrastructure track Slack channel

This presentation is pre-recorded. YouTube Link. Q & A for this session will be held on the dedicated Slack channel. Please direct your questions to Lynette Rayle (e.lynette.rayle) or Jeremy Nelson (Jeremy Nelson). Attendees will receive an invite to the Slack workspace and channel.

Jeremy Nelson from Stanford University and E. Lynette Rayle from Cornell University presented this video at the 2020 LD4 Conference on July 9.  It takes you through lessons learned and the next steps we plan to take with the linked data editing platform, specifically with how the Sinopia linked data editor interacts with the Questioning Authority (QA) Lookup Service.

Content:

• Overview of the system architecture
• Summary of supported authorities
• Explore tradeoffs of caching vs. direct access of authorities
• A look at performance challenges and how we are addressing them
• Description of our accuracy testing harness and how it is used to validate adjustments to the indexing process
• What’s next for the QA Lookup Service and Caching System
• Sinopia lookup user interface to QA
• Sinopia search user interface to QA
• Next steps to improve RDF authority imports
• Move from lookup field to lookup modal
• Expanding support for authority sources

Links to more information:

Authority Lookups

• Video: LD4P Questioning Authority Server - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwwtZ46g8Ks&t=98s
• Video: Application Use Cases for Authority Access -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yHTbaQHDgI
• Try it at:  https://lookup.ld4l.org/authority_list
• Code:  QA Lookup Service ruby engine - https://github.com/LD4P/qa_server  (starting place for setting up your own lookup service)
• Code: https://github.com/eichmann/ld4l_services
• Code: https://github.com/eichmann/LD4L

Sinopia

• Code: https://github.com/LD4P/sinopia_editor
• Development environment: https://development.sinopia.io
• Stage environment: https://stage.sinopia.io
• Production environment: https://sinopia.io

Search API Best Practices for Authoritative Data Working Group

• Project Wiki - https://wiki.lyrasis.org/x/TAsoCw

Presentation Slides:  https://bit.ly/3iH78yY

We want to thank Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their generous funding of this work.And we want to acknowledge that there are many other contributors that help to move this work forward.  We’d like to acknowledge Dave Eichmann at University of Iowa for his work on the cache system and Steven Folsom at Cornell University for his liaison role with partners to provide prioritization of authorities and identify useful extended context.We’d also like to acknowledge the full Sinopia programming team; Joshua Greben, Naomi Dushay, Johnathan Martin, Michael Giarlo, Justin Coyne, Peter Mangiafico, Justin Littman, Aaron Collier and UX designer Astrid Usong at Stanford University that worked to develop the Sinopia Editor and Sinopia Profile Editor.

Session recording (Due to technical difficulties, the audio doesn't start until 2 minutes in to the recording.)

In 2012, the Wikidata project started to give all human beings access to the sum of all Linked Data. The software behind it, Wikibase, has gained some interest in recent years. National libraries such as the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek in Germany or the Bibliothèque nationale de France have evaluated Wikibase with its unique set of features that it inherits from Wikidata: items, properties, a flexible and powerful data model, and the ability to run a SPARQL endpoint for the Linked Open Data Web out of the box. We will give you an overview of how librarians use Wikibase today, what's on the roadmap for the future, and how you can set up your own instance of Wikibase to open up your library data.

Welcome to the RDF Application Profiles track!

Google doc for Q&A for the RDF AP track.

If you are just joining this session, please register on the RDF Appliacation Profiles Track Wecome Session: https://sched.co/cs3U

This presentation will be pre-recorded. Session Facilitators will collect participant questions for the Presenter, who will answer them after the conference in written form.
Linked Data initatives in libraries seek to reap the benefits of Linked Data for our institutions and communities. The potential benefits of the cataloguing and description of both the important and mundane related entities in our world are significant. The ability to draw from externally linked resources is equally so for our users and researchers. But how relevant is this entification, linking, and sharing for visibility in the web world where the vast majority start and end their discovery journeys? Semantic Search, Structured Data, Schema.org, AI, Knowledge Graphs--all are prominent buzz phrases in the exponentially innovating world that our computers, phones, watches, and voice assistants inhabit--a world that has the potential to overwhelm and make irrelevant our inward-looking Linked Data initiatives. Does this mean that our work here is pointless? Far from it! It does mean, however, that if we do not also invest in the steps of formatting and sharing our professionally curated (and encoded) data to be prominently featured in those knowledge graphs, the users for whom we are working may never discover or benefit from our efforts. Richard will explore and discuss these formatting and sharing steps, including the work of the W3C Community Group Bibframe2Schema.org to help build a consistent bridge from the world of detailed and authoritative library linked data to the wider web world of global structured data and knowledge graphs. This presentation will be of interest to those concerned with technical or strategic approaches to the development and delivery of useful and relevant linked data discovery systems.

Google doc for Q&A for the RDF AP track.

Session recording (The recording starts a few minutes into the live conference session; to see and hear the first few minutes of the presenter's content, view this pre-recorded version of the presentation.The pre-recorded version does not include the live session Q&A.)

Staff at the University of Washington (UW) Libraries are testing the Sinopia Linked Data Editor as a tool for creating bibliographic data, part of a larger goal to move cataloging out of the MARC format and into the Resource Description Framework (RDF) model and linked-data practices. Use of the Editor requires templates defining resources to be described and properties used to make statements. UW staff have built our templates using RDF properties and classes from the Resource Description and Access (RDA) Registry, and their use in the Sinopia environment differs from the use of BIBFRAME-based profiles in a number of ways: Libraries produce bibliographic data according to the RDA content standard; UW Libraries staff are generating RDA data in RDF without translating to the BIBFRAME model, which is distinct from RDA It allows a close look at "pure RDA" linked-data output and an opportunity to evaluate its usefulness It entails challenges related to the interaction of the profiles with the Sinopia environment, and opportunities to provide feedback for the developers of Sinopia based on its use with an alternate data model This presentation will include information about the creation of RDA application profiles for use with Sinopia, a brief look at using them in the Editor for some common library resource types, an overview of what data output from the RDA profiles looks like, and consideration of other ways that adoption of RDA-in-RDF has affected work on this project. The intended audience for this presentation includes technical services staff interested in what linked-data cataloging using RDA-in-RDF might look like and how it might compare to similar cataloging using the BIBFRAME model, as well as others interested in the RDA-in-RDF data model, cataloging in the Sinopia Linked Data Editor, or the move towards linked-data cataloging in general.

Google doc for the Q&A for the RDF AP track. 

***There is no Zoom link for these sessions. Please watch them independently and join the discussion on Slack for Q & A***

Morphing the authority control, Jackie Shieh (Smithsonian Libraries)   This session is pre-recorded. YouTube link.  
The Smithsonian Libraries (SL) has been investigating whether Mediawiki/Wikibase offers solutions to the challenges of authority control in a linked data environment. This presentation hopes to share SL's efforts in transitioning both data and staff out of the current MARC environment. The SL's Wikibase instance process involved tool evaluations, data selection and preparation, and staff training. The SL's management team embraced this project as another valuable and transformative opportunity for both library collections data and staff. Please direct your questions to the Slack channel for this track.Q & A for this session will be held on the dedicated Slack channel. Please direct your questions to Jackie Shieh (jshieh).

Visioning Entity Management in FOLIO, an open-source library management system, Jason Kovari (Cornell University)
This session is pre-recorded. YouTube link.
FOLIO (https://www.folio.org/) represents a group of libraries, vendors and other stakeholders joining forces to develop an open-source library management system from the ground-up. The project is driven by subject matter expects (i.e., library staff) and has at its development core real-life library needs and aspirations. To set a vision for Entity Management within the FOLIO environment, the Entity Management Working Group (EM-WG) is developing use cases, identifying gaps in the software and defining potential short-and-medium term projects to begin work toward this vision. Entity Management in this context is both the traditional authority management libraries have performed for decades but expands to that which libraries cannot currently do with authority/entity data their ILSs as well as the management of entity-based data models, such as BIBFRAME. This lightning talk will provide a very brief overview of FOLIO's structure to ensure shared foundation knowledge among the audience. The bulk of the presentation will focus on work underway in the EM-WG, such as use cases and other aforementioned outputs. The target audience is composed of both metadata and IT professionals who are concerned about how different projects intend to conduct in-production entity management. While the group has just started work in January 2020, we will be far along with use case development and setting a direction for entity management in FOLIO by the time of the LD4 Conference in July.
Q & A for this session will be held on the dedicated Slack channel. Please direct your questions to Jason Kovari (jak473).

Session recording

Cataloging in the Sinopia Linked Data Editor requires the use of JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) profiles, which provide templates defining resources which catalogers will make statements about and the properties used to make those statements. To catalog various formats of library materials, staff at the University of Washington (UW) Libraries have created multiple profiles containing resource and property definitions which are tailored to their respective formats. The properties and constraints within these profiles vary. The task of creating and maintaining multiple format-specific profiles presents a challenge. How can staff work efficiently when many profiles are desired (11 are in use at present), and some parts of the profiles can be reused across formats, but many definitions need to be customized in each? UW staff implemented a workflow for creating multiple format profiles from a single source. This source contains all properties needed across formats, and allows for the use of the same property in different ways for different formats. Using XML transformation tools (perhaps an unlikely choice for working with JSON data), and in particular XSLT 3.0, the team has created a workflow that has two important characteristics. First, it allows staff to make changes for any and all of the distinct format profiles in only one place. Second, it requires only a single step for staff to generate or update all format-specific profiles as needed. The intended audience for this tool demonstration includes technical services staff or others interested in workflows for creating machine-readable metadata application profiles.

The "rooms" in this virtual conference are larger than the rooms in an in-person conference, but they are not infinite. In this session, Zoom can accommodate a maximum 1000 participants. If the seats fill up before you can get in the (metaphorical) door, please keep in mind that we will post the recording of the session here for you to catch up. Check out the schedule to see if there are any other sessions that you can hop into right now, or wander over to Slack and introduce yourself to other participants in the #ld4_2020__introductions channel.

Google doc for Q&A for the RDF AP track.

Session recording

During the last Sinopia work-cycle, a pain point for both development and user testing revealed problems with importing external RDF into the linked data editor. Part of the process of importing external RDF, the user is required to identify a resource template to populate the form to edit or change the description. This talk will demonstrate a machine learning approach for this classification task using FastAI and Jupyter notebooks. Presentation available at https://ld4p.github.io/classify-rdf-2020/

Google doc for Q&A for the RDF AP track.

Session recording

The LD4P Profiles Affinity Group was created to monitor the Sinopia Linked Data development and to create profiles for use by the LD4P2 cohort. One goal of the group has been to adapt the Library of Congress profiles to Sinopia, and use them as a set of profiles that could be used without changes for the majority of library cataloging work. These profiles would also serve as base templates for more specialized areas of work, and would eventually inform profile creation by cataloging standards groups such as the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC). This talk discusses our work in cooperative profile development—creating a process for profile change, versioning, modeling issues, technical problems, training & best practices—as well as the even bigger challenges of associating Bibframe to content standards such as RDA, and our early exploration with reusing linked data from other sources, such as the Library of Congress and SHARE-VDE.

Google doc for Q&A for the RDF AP track.

Discussion topic TBD based on poll results earlier in the day.

Google doc for Q&A for the RDF AP track.

This session will not be recorded.

Session recording

LC is redeveloping its very basic BIBFRAME Editor, based on 2 plus years of experience. Over the last 6 months, a project to design a new interface was carried out by a contractor working directly with a small group of experienced BIBFRAME Pilot catalogers. This presentation will review the interface design and the process for its development and the current work on a prototype editor built around the new design. The work will also reflect on the LC use of profiles.

Join us for a social activity and connect with colleagues interested in RDF Application Profiles.

This session will not be recorded.

Session recording

OCLC has been deeply involved in Linked Data research and practice for over a decade--from early explorations of Time Berners-Lee's early evangelism, to creating getting started guides for catalogers, to providing data sets to the library and research community and the creation of community-informed experimental applications. Please join us for this review of numerous experimental applications as well as fully functional linked data implementations. Discussion will also include the Entity Management Infrastructure, a partnership with LD4 and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This session, for both novices and linked data experts, will summarize OCLC's findings on the impact of new workflows in the ground-shifting transition from traditional cataloging to linked data platforms. The presentation will highlight the integral engagement, participation, and feedback from OCLC members who have guided OCLC's efforts at every step. The presentation will also attempt to chart a linked data research path for the decade to come.

Zoom recording with chat messages
Workshop dashboard with links to resources
Session recording on YouTube

This is a limited capacity session for linked data beginners. By adding this session to your schedule, you are reserving a single spot for yourself only (not a group). Each person needs to sign up individually for this session. A Zoom link will be emailed directly to attendees.
Whether you have zero linked data experience or you work with linked data regularly -- Wikidata will be playing a more central role in your life. Learning how it works is not always straightforward. This workshop introduces you to fundamental concepts of Wikidata - items, properties, references, qualifiers, and other common elements. This hands-on workshop will also address identifiers, querying, property proposals, and how these all come together to make Wikidata the force it is. There will be time for any other specific question attendees may have. There will be opportunities to edit Wikidata. This workshop will use Wiki Education's Wikidata training modules and will highlight other useful tools created by community members. Through this workshop you will gain enough familiarity with Wikidata to be comfortable with Wikidata for the other conference sessions. This workshop is especially for those who are not yet familiar with Wikidata, but anyone is welcome to participate.

If you don't already have a Wikidata account , we encourage you to create one before the workshop: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:CreateAccount

Session recording

Linked Data among Academic Libraries in Nigeria: Status and Future Direction, Basiru Adetomiwa (Redeemer's University)
Library Linked Data (LLD) produces an opportunity for libraries to expand the value proposition of describing their assets. It increases the visibility of library resources and interoperability with non-library systems. LLD helps libraries to create an open and global pool of shared data that can be used to describe resources, with a limited amount of redundant effort compared with current cataloguing processes. This presentation describes a study evaluating the status and future direction of Linked Data among Academic Libraries in Nigeria. The study adopted a survey method of research with a self-developed questionnaire as the instrument of data collection. Academic Libraries across all the Government and private institutions in southwestern Nigerian were purposively selected. The simple percentage was used to analyze the respondents' responses. Study results revealed that LLD is not recent practise among Nigerian academic libraries, but there are some barriers to academic libraries deciding to embrace LLD partly due to relative complexity of the technology, institutional factors, system limitations and skill level on the part of librarians were the major barriers to the status of LLD among the survey academic libraries in southwestern Nigeria. For academic Libraries in Nigeria to keep pace with their counterparts in the developing countries in line with the digital trends, the study recommended financial intervention, awareness, motivation for the library staff, and regular attendance at the training/workshops on emerging technologies for librarians as the solutions to the observed problems.

Library services and linked data at Makerere University: prospects of a research-led university, Onan Mulumba (Makerere University)
Makerere University is the oldest and most prestigious university in East Africa. As one of the best universities on the African content, Makerere is aligned to three main activities; Teaching, Research and Community Outreach, and these are inclined to 5 core values; allegiance to the institution, integrity, customer responsiveness, professionalism, and openness to diversity. Makerere University has a library system, hosting both electronic and print resources. The digitization of print resources has created a system, through which delicate material is conserved. The files and their metadata, using Dublin core, are stored into the institutional repository and in the integrated library system (Virtua). The library system further generates library usage data which can be used in making acquisitions decisions. For most research output files, the data is available and would be archived alongside the digital files. Other than the National Biodiversity Data Bank which is transitioning to online, the rest of the data remains stored on authors’ personal computers and other storage tools. With support from government and other development partners Makerere university strives for a shift from a more academic driven to a research-led university. This calls for more support from the university administration and other key units, to provide access points to linked data. This paper aimed at establishing the status of linked data at Makerere university, challenges encountered in data management, and prospect strategies. The researcher used an exploratory research methodology to generate key findings, from existing literature and personal experiences from experts. The findings reveal that Makerere university researchers archive their data in external repositories and that, while the Makerere Institutional Repository has the potential to host linked data, this service has not been exploited basically due to lack of skilled labor force, awareness, financial resources, and policy. However, this service, when incorporated in the institutional research agenda, can be implemented and also enhance data linking in the NBDB. It is anticipated that the results from this study will guide Makerere and other institutions in Uganda to embrace the value of linked data and therefore ignite its implementation.

Session recording

This presentation will describe an evaluative study of the cataloguing module of an In-House Software named UIILMS, which is used by the Kenneth Dike Library, University of Ibadan, Nigeria for managing records. The linked data used in creating the software being internet based, allows use of "free" data, however, connectivity issues often slow down or completely stall cataloguing procedures. The innovativeness of the software will be highlighted while at the same time describing and discussing the perceptions of the Cataloguing Section staff, in the use of the UIILMS. Recommendations will be made for improvement of the software. The audience are expected to be GLAM staff who work on cataloguing or metadata as well as software developers.

Session recording

With the charge of "pathways to implementation" the LD4P2 grant left it open to the cohorts to determine how this implementation should take place. At the Frick Art Reference Library, we trained 14 full and part-time staff members to perform record creation in BIBFRAME for four different types of library holdings. This presentation will explain how this process occurred, some best practices, and a look at how the implementation has been received by the library staff. At the heart of the Frick's implementation of BIBFRAME record creation is a Google Drive accessible to all staff members involved in the grant. Serving as a central hub, the Google Drive contains several components designed to help catalogers learn, test, and document record creation. My presentation will outline the tools created and how they have worked for the Frick Art Reference Library staff thus far. This presentation will serve as both a case study for BIBFRAME implementation at a smaller art research institution and as a model for potential scaling of our techniques and tools.

Session recording of talks by Ngozi Eunice Osadebe and Winny Nekesa Akullo. 
Pre-recorded talk by Eder Ávila Barrientos

The two live talks were followed by a pre-recorded presentation by Eder Ávila Barrientos and Filiberto Felipe Martinez Arellano, with continuing discussion on Slack for Q & A***

Federal University Libraries readiness to adopt Linked Data Initiative in Nigeria, Ngozi Eunice Osadebe (University of Nigeria)
Authors such as Hannemann and Kett (Linked Data for Libraries. A paper presented at the 76th IFLA General Conference and Assembly, Gothenburg, Sweden, 2010) and Maria, Sergio, Alejandro and Trujillo (Current State of Linked Data in Digital Libraries, 2015) have discoursed extensively on the advantages of engaging in Linked Data initiatives for Libraries. However, it has been observed that interest in the use of Linked data initiative is more among libraries (Maria, Sergio, Alejandro and Trujillo, 2015) and Organisations (Miller and Westfall, Linked Data and Libraries. The Serial Librarian. 60:17-22, 2011) in developed nations. There is not much literature on the interest of libraries in developing countries, especially Nigeria. It is based on this lack of information that this study set out to explore Federal University Libraries' readiness to engage in Linked Data Initiatives in Nigeria. Federal University Libraries were chosen for this study because they are the most funded university libraries in Nigeria. As such, they are most likely to have the capacity in terms of skilled personnel, infrastructure, and partnership necessary to engage in Linked Data Initiatives. 54 digital librarians in Nigerian Federal University Libraries served as the respondents.

Public Universities and the State of Linked Data in Uganda: Prospects and Challenges, Winny Nekesa Akullo (Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Assets Authority, Uganda)
Linked data can be broadly described as the use of networked tools and the internet to create connections between different data sets and sources. A lot of data is generated at academic institutions; for academic, research and administrative purposes. However, the exploitation of this data by the stakeholders is sometimes limited due to low discoverability and accessibility. The government of Uganda provides a budget through which research activities at public universities are funded. This research output is expected to contribute to the national development agenda. Sharing of data hinders replication of efforts and resources and, thus, should be strongly encouraged. The aim of the study described in this presentation is to establish whether, and to what extent, data at the different public universities in Uganda is linked and shared. The study found out that two universities (Kyambogo and Makerere Universities) have embarked on linked data initiatives. Makerere University through the Online National Biodiversity Data Bank links data using the URI on the Makerere University Institutional Repository provides conservationists the need to have readily available data and information regarding the countries. Kyambogo University on the other hand, has created open data awareness events on access of geospatial data using their research in areas of land surveying and economics. However, other public universities haven’t yet developed any data initiatives hence no data is linked, they use institutional repositories where research publications are uploaded this isn’t accompanied without any data set of the corresponding research. The study identified some challenges; lack of awareness within these universities about linked data technologies, inadequate funding, lack of data management policies. With government interest in research at the public universities, the proposed strategies include; creating awareness and importance of linked data in research data management, these institutions need to develop partnership and collaboration with other institutions that are implementing the linked data and develop data management policy that push the research data management agenda.

Linked Data Proposal in the Nautilo Catalog of the National Library of Mexico, Eder Ávila Barrientos and Filiberto Felipe Martinez Arellano (National Library of Mexico)
This session is pre-recorded: YouTube link
The National Library of Mexico (BNM) safeguards, organizes, preserves and provides access to Mexican bibliographic and documentary heritage. Nautilo is the BNM online catalog, which contains more than one million bibliographic records generated using the Resource Description and Access (RDA) standard, which is based on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) conceptual model, which emphasizes establishment of relationships between bibliographic data. The Nautilus catalog contains a wealth of data, represented in its records. By integrating the principles of Linked Data and FRBR, it is intended to propose a model for establishing bibliographic relationships between data available in this catalog, by means of establishment of internal and external links. On the other hand, in the last decade, worldwide national libraries have shown a wide interest Linked Data application in their search and retrieval information tools. Following this trend, it is proposed to develop a project for implementation of linked data in Nautilo for allowing, on one hand, to link their data to discover the works, manifestations and expressions that are related among them in it, and on the other one, to connect those data with other ones available in national library catalogs. The objective of this presentation is to give an overview of this project, as well as its impact on organizational changes, training of librarians, and the infrastructure necessary for its development. This will be a joint project between the BNM and the Institute of Research on Library Science and Information (IIBI) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, however, the proposed model of linked data may be extend for it application in other Latin American national libraries. This session is pre-recorded. You may view it at any time and add questions and comments on the dedicated Slack channel. Please direct your questions to Eder Ávila Barrientos (Eavila86), who will respond with answers at a later time.

Session recording

I will present the experience of American University of Beirut Library (AUB Library) in the preparation to be part of the Linked Open Data datasets by identifying entities using URIs linking and mapping elements of MARCXML to DC and Bibframe. American University of Beirut Library (AUB Library) is a member of PCC URIs in MARC Pilot Project that encourages libraries to include URIs in authorities and URIs of RDA registry in relationships. This will help at a later stage in the conversion from MARC to Bibframe, this enables the bibliographic records and metadata in Dublin Core to be part of Open Linked Data datasets and enables the search-ability and visibility of the bibliographic records of Library Catalog. AUB Library uses Sierra Library System. It facilitates the use of RDA and the WEMI entities of LRM (Library Reference Model) which replaced FRBR. RDA/LRM registry linking is helping in setting relationships between Works, Expressions, Manifestations and Items. LRM models and its relationships between entities helps in enhancing the identification of the entities that will be part of Linked Open Data datasets. Sierra Library System is working on integrating Zepheira application. It converts the bibliographic records into Bibframe and helps in the visibility of the library catalog records on the Web, it was expected to be launched at the end of 2019, but we are not sure it helps in enabling the Library catalog to be part of Linked Open Data datasets. The Library is also converting all its library digital materials into Dublin Core elements using Qualified Dublin Core Schema in order to include them in digital repository (DSpace) for institutional publications and Content Management System (XTF) for digital and digitized materials for cultural heritage. AUB Library is preserving its born digital and digitized materials for long-term preservation using ARCHIVEMETICA tool and PREMIS Metadata Schema. In addition, AUB Library is enabling the Metadata harvesting of its digital collections using OAI-MH Protocol.

This presentation is pre-recorded. Join the Session by watching the video: YouTube Link
Ask Questions in Slack:  ld4_2020_metadata_production_track Slack channel

As Linked Data is becoming one the prevalent topic in the Library, many institution are moving toward a transformation from traditional library data architecture (using MARC21) to newly developed Linked Data friendly formats (i.e. BIBFRAME). Library of Congress, as developer fo BIBFRAME, has been publishing a number of applications to transform more traditional formats inot BIBFRAME. Marc-to-BIBFRAME2 is a series of interlinked xsl stylesheets that take MARC/XML as input and outputs BIBFRAME. The University of Alberta Library Linked Data Enrichment tool is an easy-to-use Web based conversion application that leverage the LoC's marc2bibframe2 xslt package to transform MARC data (either in .mrc or .xml) to BIBFRAME. In addition this tool uses six different APIs to enrich all names (personal or corporate) and title with proper URLs. Since this conversion/enrichment tool has a user-friendly graphical user interface, using it does not require any background knowledge of XSLT, APIs or any other scripting language and all necessary actions can be done by only clicking a button. The application package is written fully in Python and is available as an open source package on GitHub. Therefore, it can be a very good start for converting and enriching data of those institution with smaller budget and a gateway for bringing their data and interest into the Linked Data ecosystem.

Session recording

Welcome session for the special collections, archives, and rare materials track.

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Open and Not Very Linked Data -- Metadata Quality in Art Museum Data Sets: A Review and Case Study of Example Data Sets from a Data Analyst Perspective, Yingying Han (University of Illinois)
The American Art Collaborative (AAC) is a consortium of 14 art museums. They strive to provide linked open data for their collections. Open data is gaining attention and adoption recently among museums. Even though these datasets are open, they typically are published in isolation from one another. Integrated datasets are more valuable than standalone subsets. This review examines geographic metadata from three representative AAC members: Princeton University Art Museum (PUAM), Gilcrease Museum (GM) and Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) and explores metadata quality problems across three dimensions: interoperability, completeness and accuracy. Interoperability: Each museum used different data structure. Both GM and PUAM published geographic data about each object's original location. While SAAM shared geographic location data about the artists' place of birth and death. Furthermore, curators did not adopt a standard when assigning the data value, especially for country name and state name and hence created interoperability problems. Completeness: This review examined geographic data completeness to identify: (1) The records where every attribute value is "null"; (2) The records without a longitude value and latitude value. The longitude and latitude numbers are important geographic markers because other metadata can be inferred computationally to identify country, state, and city. This presentation will share python scripts to accomplish these tasks. Accuracy: Frequent errors in geographic metadata include: (1) Vague or incorrect values for continent, country, and state. For example, "Central America" was value for continent in PUAM dataset. The review presents python scripts to identify this kind of error. (2) Data uncertainty introduced by unsure curators assigning data value, such as "probably Chiapas". This points out the importance of longitude and latitude values which constrain options for curators and improve data accuracy. Audience: Library catalogers, museum curators, technologist and researchers seeking to understand the data analysts' needs regarding cultural Linked Open Data (LOD) and those who aim to improve LOD quality in data sets.

Session recording

"Women Writers in Review", a case study in integrating special collections into Wikidata, Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight (Northeastern University)
Presentation
Women Writers in Review (WWiR) "is a collection of 18th- and 19th-century reviews, publication notices, literary histories, and other texts responding to works by early women writers. WWiR is published by the Women Writers Project (WWP) at Northeastern University (NEU) and was created as part of the Cultures of Reception initiative, which fosters research into the transatlantic reception and circulation of early women's texts."(https://www.wwp.northeastern.edu/review/) Since 2017, I have served as the Wiki Visiting Scholar in NEU Library's Digital Scholarship Group WWP. My involvement with WWiR focuses on Wikidata-fying (methodology development, data importation, and data integration) this special collection, an under-served area of research. Using structured data to model the collection will provide opportunities for researchers to study the reception of women's works with a new lens. For example, the Women Writers Online Scrabble Discovery Interface will eventually be integrated into the WWiR's Wikidata items with the expectation that it will serve as a research tool and pedagogical resource. The WWiR Wikidata project also hopes to serve as a case study for other institutions who wish to integrate their special collections into Wikidata. Although the WWiR Wikidata project fits within the focus of Linked Data for Production's Wikidata initiative (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Linked_Data_for_Production), it is also a collaboration with Wikisource (importation of the relevant Public Domain source documents), Wikicommons (author photos; book cover and frontispiece images), and Wikipedia (articles about the authors and works). I presented a Lightning Talk on this topic at LD4 2019, seeking feedback if it would be an area of interest to the special collections/structured data community. The positive responses led me to spend the last several months developing the project. Collaboration is warmly welcome! (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Women_Writers_in_Review) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rosiestep/WVS_Northeastern_University)

Wikidata for Archives: A Pragmatic Approach to Linked Data, Elizabeth Roke (Emory University)
At its core, archival description is about documenting the relationships between people, places, events, and records. Contextual descriptive practices used to create finding aids not only mirror the goals of linked data, but the unique people, places, and events they describe have the potential to enlarge and add new knowledge to the semantic web. While linked data methodologies seem to be a natural fit for archival description, the sophisticated infrastructure, complicated ontological structures, and expertise required to publish linked data are a heavy lift for all but the most well-resourced archival institutions. Furthermore, linked data is mostly out-of-reach for community archives, an important source of information of marginalized and underrepresented communities often left out of other descriptive sources. If linked data is to reach its full potential, there must be a low(er)-barrier way forward. This talk explores the opportunities and challenges of archival description in linked data and explores Wikidata as a pragmatic approach for publishing linked data about archival collections. It will examine existing examples of archival description in Wikidata, discuss standards-based description, and present a set of guidelines and best practices for archival description in Wikidata.

Session recording

Linked Data for Rare Materials, Paloma Graciani Picardo and Brittney Washington (Harry Ransom Center, UT Austin)
The Harry Ransom Center is home to the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library of Early English Literature, comprised of 1,259 printed books and 1,960 manuscripts created between 1475 and 1700. This high-profile rare book collection has been the testing ground for the Center's participation on the Linked Data for Production Phase 2 (LD4P2) cohort with the goal of evaluating models, vocabularies, and best practices for item-level description of rare and special collections materials using RDF. In this lightning talk, we will discuss our work developing an application profile for special collections materials. We will do a quick review of the existing ontologies and controlled vocabularies relevant to the project, and present data modeling approaches and challenges. Finally, but no less important, we will emphasize the value of special collections community engagement in these types of projects and the need for continued collaboration beyond the grant. We would love for this talk to be the beginning of a conversation with folks who are working with special collections materials and linked data.

Extending BIBFRAME for Special Collections: an update on the work of the Art & Rare Materials BIBFRAME Ontology Extension Group, Elizabeth Roke (Emory University)
Special Collections materials do not neatly fit into traditional bibliographic description models. Metadata such as custodial history or physical characteristics and conditions are essential for the description and preservation of rare materials; however, these data have not been well-supported in bibliographic models, limiting their usefulness for the archives, art, and rare materials communities. The Art & Rare Materials BIBFRAME Ontology Extension (ARM) is an effort seeking to extend BIBFRAME for archival collections, art objects, and rare materials and address the unique use cases of these communities. ARM is a joint task force that brings together content and metadata specialists from three organizations: the Association of College and Research Libraries' Rare Books and Manuscripts Sections' Bibliographic Standards Committee, the Art Libraries Society of North America's Cataloging Advisory Committee and the Society of American Archivists' Standards Committee. This lightning talk will discuss the modeling challenges particular to rare materials in BIBFRAME and how ARM is working to address those use cases though ontology and vocabulary development.

Session recording

This session will show what SNAC is, what it does, and the history of the project. It'll include the ways the project uses Linked Data with name authorities for archival materials, Wikidata connections, and discovering hidden connections. We'll have an opportunity to demonstrate the tool and how editors leverage the connections especially after an edit-a-thon for North American anthropology resources in April.

Session recording

Social hour.
This session will not be recorded.

The "rooms" in this virtual conference are larger than the rooms in an in-person conference, but they are not infinite. In this session, Zoom can accommodate a maximum of 300 participants. If the seats fill up before you can get in the (metaphorical) door, please keep in mind that we will post the recording of the session here for you to catch up. You might like to wander over to Slack and introduce yourself to other participants in the #ld4_2020__introductions channel.

Session recording

Liberté, Egalité et Free Données: The Use of Linked Data at the ISSN International Centre, Deanna White (ISSN International Centre), Pierre Godefroy (ISSN International Centre), Thomas Francart (Sparna)
The ISSN is a persistent identifier for continuing resources: this concept covers journals and the press as well as scholarly websites and databases. The uniqueness and sustainability of the ISSN are based on a dedicated and reliable system: the numbers are allocated by the ISSN International Centre and approx. 90 National Centers, for their respective countries. ISSNs are associated with a set of metadata grouped in the ISSN Registry and accessible since January 2018 via the ISSN Portal. There are currently over 2.1 million resources, in print and online described. ISSNs are used by all players in the distribution chain of continuing resources: publishers, subscription and distribution services, libraries, discovery tools, researchers and readers. In December 2019, the ISSN Portal started hosting the Keepers Registry which monitors the preservation of digital journals at the international level. The Portal is designed for both human and machine users, allowing navigation via a web browser as well as access via APIs. ISSNs are available as URIs on the ISSN Portal and resolvable via URN (an IETF standard), and via identifiers.org developed by EMBL-EBI. ISSN metadata is retrievable in RDF, JSON, and Turtle. The ISSN International Center has developed a data model based on both widely used ontologies (Schema.org and Dublin Core) for the simplest elements, and on expert ontologies (in particular Bibframe) for items specific to continuing resources. This presentation will provide a comprehensive overview of the ISSN Portal, its linked data model and its services, and discuss the challenge of interoperating with existing Persistent IDs and library catalogues.

IFLA Standards as Linked Data, Joseph Hafner (McGill University)
The IFLA Committee on Standards has a Linked Data Technical Sub-committee that is publishing all of the various IFLA standards in linked data. This has been a several year project to find the best way to move this project forward. This lightening talk will share information about this project and what is available this way. Joseph is the Chair of the Subcommittee and working with a company who is in the process of making this happen.

ID.LOC.GOV, Paul Frank (Library of Congress)
Many persons are not even aware of the existence of ID.LOC.GOV even though it is available for searching by anyone. It is a Library of Congress (LC) linked data service that is maintained and augmented continually by LC. After a short history, the focus will be on how to search it efficiently and effectively to find the data you are seeking.

Session recording of "Periods, Organized (PeriodO): A Linked Data Gazetteer for Chronological Period Definitions" and "Modeling Cultural Heritage Information on the Medieval Middle East"

Periods, Organized (PeriodO): A Linked Data Gazetteer for Chronological Period Definitions, Adam Rabinowitz (UT Austin), Ryan Shaw (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Patrick Golden (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
This will be a live presentation, but video demos of PeriodO are viewable in advance.
This demo introduces PeriodO (https://perio.do), a Linked Data gazetteer of chronological periods. PeriodO provides structured-data representations of named time-spans according to the spatial and temporal boundaries provided for those named time-spans by authoritative sources. By documenting definitions from specific authorities, rather than proposing a standardized vocabulary, PeriodO makes it possible to assign temporal-coverage metadata values that are specific to particular places, disciplines, traditions, or scholarly communities in a transparent manner. The gazetteer provides persistent identifiers, clear provenance for definitions and authorities, and internal semantic relationships that indicate, for example, that one period definition is derived from another. The demo will cover browsing the PeriodO gazetteer using the updated user interface, reconciling a local defined period vocabulary against the PeriodO dataset using Open Refine, and adding new periods to PeriodO. It will also introduce visualization plug-ins and Python scripts for command-line reconciliation. The demo will conclude with a discussion of the next phase of PeriodO's development and its usefulness as a linking node to connect temporal information described with natural-language chronological terms. The intended audience for this demo includes metadata managers, museum database administrators, archivists, data aggregators, scholars in the historical disciplines, and anyone interested in the intellectual history of periodization.

Links All the Way Down: Emblematica as a LOD Case Study, Presenters: Cindy Tian (Notre Dame Law Library) and Greta Heng (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Co-authors: Timothy W. Cole and Myung-Ja Han (University of Illinois)
Pre-recorded presentation. Please watch this independently on Youtube and join us on Slack for Q&A: #ld4_2020_data_sources_track
Linked Open Data (LOD) infrastructure relies on well-designed ontologies, frameworks and identifier best practices. But the finest infrastructure is worthless if you cannot reconcile your metadata to link to appropriate LOD authorities, and (importantly) if you cannot connect these authorities one to another in ways that improve end user services. Emblematica Online, a digital library portal which provides integrated discovery and access to 1,388 digitized emblem books from six major international rare book emblem collections, was used as a case study to examine reconciliation obstacles and illustrate potential connectedness benefits. Book-level descriptions of digitized emblem books derived from legacy cataloging were analyzed. String values & codes for names, languages, subjects, and genres were searched using LOD Authority APIs (VIAF, Library of Congress, Getty) to discover entity URI links. Results highlighted the challenges of reconciling legacy cataloging metadata, some of which were overcome in a second pass by extending and refining processing logic. But results also highlighted the limitations of legacy-based authorities. Name and subject cataloging practices have varied over time and between Europe and North America. Subject authorities vary in degree of hierarchy and redundancies. There are trade-offs in historical choices that have impact today (e.g., between simple and compound subject headings). These trade-offs and other differences can impact potential user services. This research suggests that leveraging links between authority records -- e.g., between LCSH and RAMEAU subject authorities, and between VIAF and DNB name authorities--can help enhance user services. This lightning talk will share the study results, illustrate approaches that we found improved reconciliation, and highlight why authorities in combination are better than over reliance on single authorities. This case study provides another data point for others implementing LOD to enhance the discovery and value of digitized special collection library resources.

Modeling Cultural Heritage Information on the Medieval Middle East, Daniel L. Schwartz (Texas A&M)
This session demonstrates Syriaca.org, a linked open data project for the field of Syriac Studies. Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic that flourished in the Middle East between the 3rd and 9th centuries. It is still used liturgically by Christian communities in the Middle East as well as by diaspora communities in Europe and North America. Syriac offers the third largest corpus of literature (after Greek and Latin) from the ancient Mediterranean world; including histories, letters, theology, and early Biblical translations. Since modern Syriac communities lack national archives, libraries, or museums to provide a linked open data infrastructure for the field, it has been incumbent upon scholars in the fields of History, Near Eastern Studies, and Religious Studies to undertake this task. Syriaca.org publishes collections of authority files on persons, places, works, and bibliography. Additional collections on manuscripts and a domain ontology of structured keywords for describing ancient entities and the secondary literature produced by scholars are in production. Each authority file identifies an entity, assigns a cool URI (i.e., a URI that is also a URL resolvable by a web browser), and encodes core data on that entity. This data is stored natively in TEI XML and the encoding of each file makes extensive use of URIs for other entities. Syriaca.org has developed the Srophé App to provide a variety of ways for users to engage with the resulting data graph. Built on eXist-db, The Srophé App directs human users to an html display of the data but also services API calls for either the base TEI data or a serialization of that data into RDF. A web plugin allows online projects using Syriaca.org URIs to link back to our data graph. The intended audience for this session is GLAM institutions interested in linked data produced by humanities researchers.

Session recording (Picknally Camden & Hahn; Khan & Usong)

Prototyping and Evaluating the Share-VDE (Virtual Discovery Environment) Linked Data Discovery Interface, Beth Picknally Camden and Jim Hahn (University of Pennsylvania)
The Share-VDE (Virtual Discovery Environment) has engaged a global partnership, with library-driven development.The project encompasses enrichment and conversion from MARC to BIBFRAME/RDF, creation of a cluster knowledge base, development of manual and automated tools for interacting with data, and the creation of a linked data discovery environment. University of Pennsylvania Libraries have been a Share-VDE partner since its inception in 2016, and, in 2019, embarked on a special project with Casalini, @Cult and Samhaeng for further development on the user interface. Penn’s goals are to demonstrate discovery in a linked-data user environment, and to enhance usability with APIs that will allow users to find resources and request delivery (local or ILL). This presentation will focus on the process for developing the prototype (UX/UI design, mock-up, technology review, etc.) and include a demo of the prototype. Additionally, we will articulate a set of interface evaluation metrics in the form of a heuristic research agenda for linked data discovery. The research provides an understanding of the capabilities of the Share-VDE interface to support the user tasks promulgated in the IFLA Library Reference Model (LRM).

The library catalog and linked data: a tale of two technologies, Huda Khan (Cornell University), Astrid Usong (Stanford University)
In the Linked Data For Production: Pathway to Implementation (LD4P2) project, we employed a user-centered approach to explore the integration of linked data sources in library discovery interfaces Through a combination of user interviews and evaluations of mockups and prototypes, we sought to better understand how linked data can meet user needs around search in the library catalog that extend beyond known-item search to more open-ended discovery tasks. We have also investigated concrete approaches for using Schema.org to improve the indexing of our catalog records by search engines. In this session, we review our design and prototyping efforts, Blacklight integration work, and the user research and evaluations we have conducted to address the four main discovery areas laid out in the LD4P2 grant: knowledge panels, browsing, semantic search, and the use of Schema.org. We will discuss the larger questions of intended user experience and delve into what we learned from users about our mockups and prototypes incorporating context, suggestions, and relationships to subjects, people, and collections. We will also discuss specific challenges and lessons learned while developing Blacklight prototypes bringing in data from both linked data sources such as Library of Congress name and subject authorities, Wikidata, DbPedia, FAST, and VIAF; as well as from external sources such as Who's on First, Discogs, Google Books search, the Open Syllabus Project, and Cornell Digital Collections. Some challenges for integrating data from non-catalog sources include inconsistent availability of connections between catalog entities and linked data sources, consistency and comprehensiveness of the data, reliability, and the performance of queries or data retrieval. We will also discuss possible future directions for improving user experience and integrating this work into Blacklight.

Book actions and Linked Bibliographic Data at Google, Erin Dobias (Google) (This presentation will not be recorded.)
Over the last few years Google has worked on exposing library holdings for ebooks, audiobooks, and print books in both Knowledge Panels and on the new books.google.com, allowing users to explore the holdings at their local library and discover formats that they may not have previously considered. In this presentation, I will discuss how this data is exposed, and how the increased exposure has driven the need for Work IDs, work/manifestations relationships, and manifestation/manifestation relationships in bibliographic data.

Session recording

In its 2018-2021 Strategic Directions, the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) has highlighted the importance of the shift from traditional authority control to identity management. What are the plans for experimenting with identity management in the LC projects related to BIBFRAME? This presentation will look at the use of Wikidata and other “trusted” sources to provide personal name access to BIBFRAME descriptions. Different configurations for this extension of access to personal names will be explored, such as continuing, lightning, or eliminating traditional name authority control for these entities.

Session recording

The infrastructures undergirding linked data projects are complex and varied. As the technological stacks and social infrastructures come into greater maturity, the general landscape has grown in complexity too, possibly to the point of being overwhelming for GLAM institutions. As a result it can be difficult to separate out what tools are essential for linked data initiatives from what are not. Similarly, complexity has increased in these projects possibly to the point of obfuscating their practical ends. The framework of minimal computing provides a useful lens for interpreting the role of technologies with an aim towards identifying needless complexity and increasing access through concretely asking what is actually needed for a successful project. Further, it seeks to tie these efforts to their social impacts and how it can build capacity for those working in non-Western societies. By exploring specifically the concepts of minimal design, dependencies, and maintenance and others, we may be able to more effectively examine those aspects of linked data that could be reconfigured or disbanded. Hopefully, this would lead towards an environment that purposefully addresses the challenges that arose in previous decades of GLAM metadata without introducing newer forms of complexity As so many decisions cascade from how the real world is defined in ontologies, minimal computing has much to offer towards simplifying the infrastructures and conditions that they necessarily outline. This session applies principles of minimal computing to ontology design using the example of a glacier ontology in development at the University of Colorado Boulder. Specifically we will address how using minimal computing is in line with a more materialist approach to data modeling that seeks to aim linked data initiatives within concrete realities and away from unwarranted abstraction. Practical advice for how to apply minimal computing principles to other areas of linked data projects will also be addressed.

Session recording

Resources discussed during session
 
As linked data technologies allow institutions to piece together metadata fields from various ontologies, local metadata standards can continue to be customized while providing interoperability and semantic connections that would not otherwise be possible. Whether your institution uses Dublin Core or another standard as its base, it can sometimes be challenging to consider which ontologies are appropriate to use and why. For instance, the Samvera MODS and RDF Description Metadata Subgroup provided guidelines for utilizing a variety of ontologies, including BIBFRAME, together to map MODS to RDF. In other cases, the linked data community is creating new domain-specific ontologies. How do these various strategies provide richer linked data? What are the potential pitfalls? In this informal Birds of a Feather, participants will be encouraged to share their own examples and discuss developments related to the emergence of new standards.

Session recording

In 2018, the cataloging librarians from the three branches of University of Houston libraries (UH Main, UH Clear Lake and UH Downtown) formed a study group with the goal of understanding the concepts of BIBFRAME and Linked Data, testing the BIBFRAME editor and exploring ways of converting MARC records to BIBFRAME. The group has come up with a self-paced study plan and met monthly online to discuss a list of self-prepared questions related to the learning materials. Since then, through conferences and serendipitous contacts, the group has grown to include seven catalog librarians from multiple institutions across the country. The group has adjusted the study plan and decided to continue meeting monthly on a set topic. So far we have reviewed what we learned last year on the basic concept of linked data, and now we are furthering our knowledge with study plans on Sinopia editor and Wikidata. In the future, we hope to work both individually and collaboratively across the institutions to design and implement linked data projects that will make our collections more visible on the web. The lightning talk will highlight the rationale behind forming the study group. We hope the example of our study group can help solo librarians who feel alone to reach out and connect with like minded colleagues. Because we all have different strengths, we can learn from each other and the collaborative nature of the group can keep us motivated. In our talk, we will also cover the design of the study plan, discussion questions, and tools used to facilitate the monthly discussions.

Session recording

Where Linked Data Can Impact User Experience: Findings from a Study on Discovery Workflows, Emma Boettcher (University of Chicago)
Slides available: https://static.sched.com/hosted_files/ld42020/e0/2020LD4_discovery_boettcher.pdf
In 2019, the University of Chicago Library conducted interviews with 19 students and faculty members about how they discover literature for their research. During the sessions, the interviewers did not mention linked data once – and that was intentional. Unlike usability studies that put a solution in front of the participant and evaluate whether it solves their problems (or produces new ones), this form of user research allowed us to learn more about existing workflows and challenges in our participants' research. With each interview, we learned what relationships between resources our users value during discovery, how they measure the usefulness of search results, and where they see themselves situated in their fields. This presentation will go over the findings from this study, focusing especially on the ones that have implications for linked data for discovery. It will cover how library users seek out related resources and what relationships matter to them; how date, author, and other parts of an article are used and evaluated for relevance to the researcher's topic; and the challenges encountered by newcomers to a topic, even if they consider themselves experienced researchers in other fields. Based on these findings, the sessions will also suggest where future work, both in user research and in linked data for discovery interfaces, could make the most impact. While the presentation may be of most interest to UX researchers and designers, it should also be of interest for anyone who works in discovery at their library.

A research agenda for the evaluation of semantic search interfaces, Jim Hahn and John Mark Ockerbloom (University of Pennsylvania)
Slides available: https://works.bepress.com/john_mark_ockerbloom/20/ 
For research libraries to move successfully from experimentation to implementation with library linked data and semantic search interfaces, we need to better understand how these systems can best support users' information discovery needs. This presentation outlines a research agenda and methodologies we will use in the University of Pennsylvania Libraries to evaluate, implement, and extend library discovery systems using enriched and linked metadata, including systems used in the LD4 community. Our intended audience is librarians and developers of linked data systems with an interest in discovery. Our research agenda begins with user tasks described in the IFLA Library Reference Model (LRM), but also considers extensions to those basic tasks that linked data-enabled systems support. These extensions include enhanced topical browsing; the discovery of works, people, and topics across multiple information collections; and the selection and delivery of the most appropriate copy of a sought-after work in a multi-library context that takes into account both content and obtainability. Our evaluation methodologies include both quantitative and qualitative analyses. We will begin with analyses of current discovery search logs, and continue with user studies to determine user tasks that are well-supported by our semantic search systems, and to identify gaps in data, services, and interface designs for meeting user needs. We may also prototype extensions to our platforms and metadata and test their effectiveness. Platforms we will use for evaluation include the SHARE-VDE linked data catalog being developed with various library partners, the Blacklight-based catalog developed at Penn for our local library collection and for an experimental Ivy+ shared discovery service, and Penn's Online Books Page catalog and accompanying Forward to Libraries service. We hope in our research to articulate the best uses of semantic searching, and the most effective investments in systems, interfaces, and metadata to support discovery in a linked-data environment.

Session recording

Metaphactory (https://metaphacts.com/) is a linked data software framework for managing, querying, and exploring knowledge graphs. It supports rapid prototyping and provides an environment for testing and applying search and discovery strategies driven by linked data. Among its features, metaphactory includes a built-in templating engine that facilitates the creation of custom search forms and visualizations. Yale University Library used funds from its Linked Data for Production (LD4P2) cohort subgrant to purchase a metaphactory license, and staff are currently in the process of receiving training from the vendor (metaphacts GmbH) in order to develop expertise in using the features of the software. As the only LD4P2 institution to use its subgrant funds to purchase a license for enterprise-grade software built entirely on linked data standards, Yale's experience with metaphactory is unique in the LD4P2 cohort. A demonstration and critical evaluation of the tool will provide attendees with a concrete example of the possibilities and potential limitations of using a discovery platform that is linked data native.

Session recording of the live Q&A on Zoom
Pre-recorded presentation

In June of 2017, Carnegie Hall published its performance history as linked open data under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Public Domain data license. Carnegie Hall Data Lab (carnegiehall.github.io/datalab) was launched in January of 2020 as a learning space for Carnegie Hall to expand our understanding of information innovation through experiments with linked open data, semantic technologies, and data-driven strategies that leverage the resources of the Carnegie Hall Archives. We strive to reinforce Carnegie Hall's role as a leading cultural heritage institution by investigating new ways to engage and educate by sharing a wider range of resources and context about our past, present, and future. A primary goal of our Data Lab is to use Carnegie Hall's rich historical legacy as focal point or lens through which to tell untold stories and examine hidden connections within the world of music and other cultural and societal domains. We hope to showcase what a relatively small staff with rudimentary developer skills and limited IT support has been able to accomplish through our lightweight, nimble, and experimental linked open data initiative. We'll give a quick overview of our LOD, talk briefly about the creation of the Data Lab, review our progress thus far, and highlight some fun and interesting collaborations we're working on Intended audience: GLAM professionals interested in learning about a LOD project accomplished with relatively limited developer skills and a minimum of IT support.

Session recording

Many of us who work with linked data have probably encountered a colleague, or even a supervisor, who have confided in us that they don't understand linked data and think they never will. Part of this uncertainty is due to the technical nature of linked data, but another aspect is how we, as subject experts, talk about it. I will discuss how subject experts can talk about linked data with our colleagues in a way that is easily understandable and can alleviate worries and feelings of inadequacy.

Session recording

Will Linked Data Enhance the Discovery of Multilingual Resources? Charlene Chou and Alexandra Provo (New York University)
Slides
Multilingual resources have been challenging for bibliographic description and discovery systems for years because of complex issues concerning data models and interface functions in various systems and platforms. For example, the IFLA Library Reference Model indicates that "in the implicit conceptualization of librarians, all translations are viewed as expressions of the same work; rights societies have a very different concept of "work", and regard each translation as a distinct "work"." For countries with multiple official languages, many publications are multilingual and distinctions between the original language and translations could be confusing for users. When the resources are written in both Roman and non-Roman scripts, bibliographic descriptions could get more intricate due to the display of native scripts, transliteration and translations. This presentation will explore and examine whether current metadata models, linked data editors as well as discovery systems would enhance the discovery of multilingual resources. Various use cases will be used to describe the challenges and opportunities for improvements. For instance, what are the issues of describing these resources in the Library of Congress BIBFRAME Editor and Sinopia Editor currently? Shall we adjust our approaches to accommodate these specific demands for better discovery? In addition, some use cases will be used to illustrate complex issues of digital collections at New York University, such as Arabic Collections Online (ACO) and the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (HIDVL). In the case of ACO, the multilingual metadata needs of the digital library website are sometimes at odds with rules governing MARC-based cataloging practices. This case hints at future challenges we may face as we move legacy metadata to linked data environments, imposing new models and expectations on our metadata. As a tri-lingual project, HIDVL presents related opportunities to think through how we might improve storage of multilingual metadata. We will conclude with ideas for further research as well as recommendations and suggestions using the models of Wikipedia/Wikidata for multiple language interfaces.

GaNCH: Using Linked Open Data for Georgia's Natural, Cultural, and Historic Organizations' Disaster Response, Cliff Landis and Allyson F. Smith (Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library)
Slides
Through a one-year LYRASIS Catalyst Grant, the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library is creating a publicly editable directory of Georgia's Natural, Cultural and Historical Organizations (NCHs), allowing for quick retrieval of coordinate location and contact information for disaster response. Directory information is being compiled, updated, and uploaded to Wikidata, the linked open data database from the Wikimedia Foundation. Directory information will then be delivered via a website, allowing federal, state, and regional emergency responders to quickly search for NCHs in disaster areas. Partnerships with state professional NCH organizations ensure that the compiled datasets will be sustained over time. Session attendees will learn how the directory was created, and how to replicate the project to preserve their own region's rich natural, cultural, and historical resources using free online tools.

Faculty Curation and Linked Open Data: BigDIVA.org, Laura Mandell (Texas A&M University Advanced Research Consortium)
Slides
The intended audience for this session are librarians and digital humanists interested in visualization tools that are being developed for Linked Open Data, especially those that enable serendipity in research and discovery of open-access materials via searches that integrate proprietary resources as well. The Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) is the overarching organization for NINES, 18thConnect, Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance (Mesa), ModNets, and three forthcoming data aggregators: the American Antiquarian Society's Networked Early American Resources, Disability Studies, and Asian American Literature. Each aggregator and scholarly community provides peer review for digital projects and approves ingesting other open-access materials provided by libraries and museums. Once accepted by the scholarly community -- nines.org, 18thConnect.org, mesa-medieval.org, modnets.org -- RDF metadata for each project, vendor, and institution is ingested into the ARC database, along with proprietary materials essential to researchers in those fields from JSTOR, ProjectMuse, Gale, and ProQuest, among others. The complete ARC catalog is visible through BigDIVA.org, the Big Data Infrastructure Visualization Application. ARC has partnered on a grant received from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation to transform the current ARC metadata (XML-RDF) into Linked Open Data and to transform Big Diva into an LOD visualization tool. We would like to present and receive feedback about our metadata, search capacities, the BigDIVA tool and our ideas for transforming BigDIVA into an LOD Viewer.

Session recording

In brief, this presentation will include:
- An intro to IIIF for AV manifests
- An intro and tool walk through of our application, AudiAnnotate
- A focus on documentation and workflows for users

Presentation Slides

Further details:
How can linked data be accessible and useful for researching sound? Using IIIF and Web Annotations, which are both based on linked data, AudiAnnotate, a collaboration between HiPSTAS: High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship and Brumfield Labs, creates a way for researchers to add annotations to audio files, and to preserve those annotations for research and sharing. This is an especially valuable resource for those doing research in audiovisual materials in archival collections at libraries, archives, and other cultural institutions. Such materials often present intimate, valuable, and distinctive audio, yet there are often restrictions regarding exportation and use of audiovisual materials outside of reading rooms. AudiAnnotate provides a workflow for users to annotate archival audio files using Audacity, producing files that can then be uploaded on AudiAnnotate's web application. Within the application, a IIIF manifest of annotations will be played using Universal Viewer. This IIIF environment allows for annotation data to target sound data and be rendered into a canvas where multiple sets of annotations can be compiled. The AudiAnnotate application also supports organization and tabulation of layers of annotations from Audacity, that are collected and organized within the application, which runs on top of a GitHub repository that stores annotation data for future use. This presentation will include an introduction to the AudiAnnotate project, and share the annotation process and workflow for creating a manifest and storing annotations. This presentation will be useful to those who work at cultural institutions and are interested in expanding resources for working with audiovisual materials, those who work with audiovisual materials in their research, and anyone curious about linked data and audio materials.

Session recording

Looking beyond LC: Wikidata for Metadata Reconciliation and Enhancement, Greer Martin (Loyola University Chicago)
This lightning talk will discuss the use of Wikidata for retrieving geodata for a Wordpress mapping project. Data from a website, a directory of women scholars in a specific field, required normalization, and the Library of Congress authorities were the initial target for this work, via reconciliation services in OpenRefine. However, Wikidata provided more: name reconciliation and the required geographic data for our mapping plugin, due the ability to pull properties of reconciled Wikidata records.The simplicity of this task has inspired the investigation of using Wikidata for digital collections metadata remediation, particularly for building and personal names, with an eye towards how this data can be enhanced by Wikidata data extensions.

Using IIIF to help improve search and discovery of digital cultural heritage material, Jeff Mixter (OCLC)
OCLC is a member in the IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) Consortium and has been integrating IIIF standards in OCLC products for the past 4 years. In 2019, OCLC Research started experimenting with the IIIF Change Discovery API, testing its use as an IIIF syndication and aggregation protocol. This experimental work confirmed the benefits of standardization around the IIIF Change Discovery API and resulted in an experimental discovery application for searching across 13 Million IIIF compliant CONTENTdm resources. Jeff will demonstrate the experimental search application and highlight the metadata analysis and synthesis challenges that arise when working with heterogeneous IIIF resource descriptions in a large aggregation.

Session recording

Please join the Slack Wikidata track channel, #ld4_2020_wikidata_track for session updates and discussions. All Wikidata sessions on July 30th will use the same Zoom meeting.  For the session logistics, refer to this page.

Session recording

Wikidata Tutorial: Intro to the Basics will provide a hands-on introduction to Wikidata and the Wikidata Query Tool.  In this interactive workshop, participants will learn the basic functions of both and how to make simple manual edits to Wikidata items and create simple database queries.  The workshop will also briefly discuss how institutions can use Wikidata effectively.

Links for audience participation: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Gamaliel/LD4

Please write your questions in the Google doc (bit.ly/LD4Conf2020Wikidata) for the Wikidata track.

Session recording

This workshop will introduce a number of tools and resources that make use of more complex and often underappreciated or underused features offered by Wikidata. It is intended to not only motivate the further exploration of Wikidata beyond what has been frequently encountered for its use and expansion, but also promote wide-ranging discussion of linked data's involvement in GLAM-related disciplines and beyond in nonstandard ways and the role Wikidata can play in these areas. Participants will get the opportunity to approach Wikidata as a multifaceted entity in which different modes of organization and interaction can accommodate the specific needs of disparate subject areas, and they will be able to make improvements in each of these modes. Throughout this workshop constructive discussion among the entire group about linked data usage and editing workflows (including tool choice and editing procedures for specific areas) will be encouraged.
By the end of the workshop, they will be able to

• manually reconcile diverse catalogs with Wikidata items using mix'n'match,
• use and contribute information about lexemes for their language of choice, and
• use and contribute to the structured (meta)data of files on Wikimedia Commons.

There is an initial expectation that participants have some experience using Wikidata, no matter how little this may be (if there's an introductory Wikidata workshop at the conference, for example, then attending that will suffice!), but this workshop may be conducted in a way that accommodates those for whom this expectation does not hold. Beyond this, however, all conference attendees, whether with particularly GLAM-focused interests or otherwise, will be welcome to participate.
Please write your questions in the Google doc (bit.ly/LD4Conf2020Wikidata) for the Wikidata track.

Session recording

Slides

In this session Wiki Education's Wikidata Program Manager, Will Kent, will spend time exploring ways Wiki Education's Wikidata program has acted as a catalyst to create Wikidata Projects. This interactive session will touch on many themes exploring how to sustain editing on Wikidata, ways to address multiple processes on Wikidata, sharing these results, and encouraging others to get involved. This session will answer the question: What impact will my institution's data have on Wikidata? Anyone is welcome to attend this session, but it may be of particular interest for anyone who is starting a linked data project at their institution, looking to learn more about linked data implementation, or is curious about how Wikidata works.

Please write your questions in the Google doc (bit.ly/LD4Conf2020Wikidata) for the Wikidata track.

Session recording

Content enrichment of Institutional Repository Records consuming Linked Data, Vinit Kumar (Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Lucknow, India)
Metadata plays an important role in the discoverability of records in digital collections and institutional repositories. In this talk, I would like to present the SELOS model developed for the content enrichment of institutional repository records by consuming Linked Datasets. The enrichments add value to the records by providing better discoverability in searching and browsing of the digital collections. The presentation will further discuss the SELOS model, its various layers, tools, and involved technologies. One application profile of the SELOS model is developed as a prototype, the talk will discuss the prototype's design, configuration, workflow, implementation and demonstration in detail.

Data-Driven Semantic DAM Indexing Incorporating Statistical Play-by-play Game Logs: A Linked Data Application using Wikibase from the 2017 Football Season of the Alabama Crimson Tide, Steven MacCall (University of Alabama)
Our aim with this project was to demonstrate how statistical play-by-play datasets generated by loggers during college football games could be incorporated into a semantic indexing process for photos and video clips captured during those games. We chose to deploy a linked data approach using Wikibase and Mediawiki as our software. We were able to successfully transform publicly available JSON-formatted statistical play-by-play datasets for all 14 games in the 2017 Alabama Crimson Tide football season into a linked data application. One can now navigate from play to play, drive to drive, and game to game within the 2017 football season using data drawn from transformed JSON-formatted datasets. In this presentation, we will walk through the data processing pipeline procedures that we developed to wrangle and clean our acquired datasets in order to transform them into RDF, including the use of Python scripts for enhancing processing efficiencies and Quickstatements for uploading to our Wikibase instance. We will also show how we designed infobox templates in our Mediawiki instance so that play data could be displayed automatically from each play's connected Wikibase item page. Finally, we will demonstrate navigation methods for browsing as well as the use of our SPARQL endpoint for the complex querying of the Blazegraph triplestore.

Session recording

Please join the Slack Wikidata track channel, #ld4_2020_wikidata_track for session updates and discussions. The first two Wikidata sessions on July 31st will use the Zoom Webinar link. The last session is a collaborative session and will be a Zoom Meeting link. For more on the session logistics, refer to this page.

Session recording

VanderBot is a set of Python scripts that scrapes data from departmental websites, then creates or updates researcher records in Wikidata. The code interacts with the Wikidata SPARQL endpoint and API to determine what entities and references already exist in Wikidata and ensure that duplicate information is not uploaded. Although our project is focused on managing Vanderbilt researcher items, the script that writes to the API uses a customizable schema based on the W3C "Generating RDF from Tabular Data on the Web" Recommendation, making it possible to write data about any kind of item using the Wikidata API. This presentation will be most useful to programmers, but may interest anyone who wants to understand more about the Wikibase data model and how Wikidata works "under the hood".

The presentation video as streamed during the session can be viewed on YouTube.

Please write your questions in the Google doc (bit.ly/LD4Conf2020Wikidata) for the Wikidata track.

Session recording

Since June 2019, Stanford library staff have met weekly to build skills and work on projects related to Wikidata. This presentation will provide an overview of the structure and format of the working group, and discuss the challenges and opportunities for librarians working in Wikidata that the group's activities have surfaced. Topics covered will include data models, remediation (particularly of external identifiers in Wikidata), and documentation. The presentation will share lessons learned from the working group over the past year, and offer ideas for ongoing future collaboration and community-building across libraries and cultural heritage institutions in the Wikidata space. The intended audience is librarians and other cultural heritage professionals interested in working with Wikidata, whether as contributors, consumers, or both.


Please write your questions in the Google doc (bit.ly/LD4Conf2020Wikidata) for the Wikidata track.

Session recording

Event page: https://bit.ly/2Pfhjx0
Slides

The LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group began in April 2019 as a community discussion space with calls every two weeks open to anyone to learn more about how libraries can contribute to and benefit from Wikidata. Recently, the Group started hosting regular virtual Wikidata Working Hours every two weeks as well. These have been a time for participants to spend an hour working in Wikidata either on their own projects or on tasks related to a specific topic chosen for that session. This session is a chance for a virtual meet-up to do hands-on work adding references to Wikidata. Wikidata relies on references for data quality and librarians are seen as important collaborators within the Wikimedia community for providing reliable sources. This Wikidata Working Hour will give participants tools, resources, and examples necessary to participate in the campaign and add references to Wikidata and perhaps even host an event at their own institution after the conference. People with all levels of Wikidata experience are welcome to attend!


Please write your questions in the Google doc (bit.ly/LD4Conf2020Wikidata) for the Wikidata track.