Katrina Fenlon
Assistant Professor
University of Maryland
Diana Marsh
Associate Professor
University of Maryland
Robert Sanderson
Senior Director for Digital Cultural Heritage
Yale University
Amy Warner May
Associate Director of Scholarly Resources
The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
Trevor Muñoz
Systems Librarian for Research Technology
University of Maryland
Libraries, archives, museums, and research organizations have inherited information infrastructures shaped by disciplinary traditions, current technologies, and institutional boundaries, resulting in different standards describing the same contextual entities or collections. This briefing brings together project findings from multiple organizations and contexts, with different scales and timelines, to explore how Linked Open Data and open standards, enhanced by emerging artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, can help aggregate, connect, and enhance discovery for disparate cultural heritage collections. In partnership with the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS) initiative, the “BarcStory” project is experimenting with data and records on the history of the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC) to explore how archives, scientific publication data, and historical scientific datasets may be transformed, mapped, interlinked, and enriched to contextualize both historical and contemporary records at the intersection of disciplines. Recent work in the Social Networks and Archival Contexts platform has sought to interconnect records of Indigenous nations and Tribes across the US, while attending to cultural privacy and community limitations on AI. The LUX project at Yale University offers a now mature and sustainable, but still cutting-edge, institutional example of bringing together cultural heritage information across collections and descriptive traditions to create an integrated knowledge environment, by leveraging the Linked Art Data Model and AI-enhanced workflows. The Bodleian Libraries in the UK are exploring a number of initiatives in this space, in particular the Digitisation Capability Pilot commissioned by the National Research Infrastructure for Cultural Heritage (N-RICH) Prototype, looking to make recommendations for investment in technology and skills.
https://barcstory.org
https://portal.lincsproject.ca
https://lux.collections.yale.edu/
https://linked.art/model/
https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/services/research-partnerships/n-rich-digitisation-capability-pilot
