The Linked Data for Libraries (LD4L) Project: A Progress Report

Dean B. Krafft
Chief Technology Strategist
Cornell University

Tom Cramer
Chief Technology Strategist
Stanford University

We will report on the first year of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Linked Data for Libraries (LD4L) project. LD4L is a partnership of Cornell University Library, Stanford University Libraries, and the Harvard Library Innovation Lab. The goal of the project is to use Linked Open Data to leverage the intellectual value that librarians and other domain experts and scholars add to information resources when they describe, annotate, organize, select, and use those resources, together with the social value evident from patterns of usage. The project is producing an ontology, architecture, and set of tools that work both within and across individual institutions in an extensible network. This progress report will describe the LD4L use cases, which focus on linking data about library bibliographic resources for well-described assets (the catalog) with other silos of information, including people’s scholarly profiles, curation and annotation data, and information about usage. We will also discuss the relationship of LD4L to BIBFRAME and how LD4L efforts are seeking to influence BIBFRAME development; the emerging LD4L ontology and the various component ontologies that it draws upon; our progress in representing structural, annotation, curation, and usage metadata beyond MARC and BIBFRAME; and our initial engineering work in drawing from disparate library data sources, exploring potential user-facing services, and beginning to integrate with the Hydra Framework.

http://ld4l.org

Presentation