Richard Wallis recently commented on the incorporation of linked data and linked open data at libraries. Wallis writes, “Last summer, it was great to play a small part in the release of the British National Bibliography as Linked Data by the British Library – openly available via Talis and their Kasabi Platform.  Late last year the Library of Congress announced that Linked Data and RDF was on their roadmap, soon followed by the report and plan from Stanford University with Linked Data at its core.  More recently still, Europeana have opened up access to a large amount of cultural heritage, including library, data. Even more recently I note that OCLC, at their EMEA Regional Council Meeting in Birmingham this week, see Linked Data as an important topic on the library agenda.” Read more

On Monday, July 18, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the eighth installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about Google+, the recent Open Data Challenge in Europe, the British Library, BioBlitz, and more.
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A new article reports that the British Library has announced “a significant contribution to the development, application, and sharing of bibliographic data using Linked Data techniques and technologies, with a preview of a new approach to publishing the British National Bibliography. Chief Executive Dame Lynne Brindley announced the initiative in her Keynote at Linked Data and Libraries 2011, hosted by Talis at the British Library (BL) in London.” Read more

Laura Campbell, CIO of the Library of Congress, spoke at the recent SemTech Conference about how the world’s largest library leverages semantic technology to help manage the vast resources of the LoC.

The Library of Congress is “more than just a library,” said Campbell, pointing out that the LoC has “the Congressional Research Service, the Copyright Office of the U.S., and the Law Library in addition to the National Collection.” With over 146 Million items in 470 languages, represented in both analog and digital content, and with newly gathered material regularly being added from around the world, there is undeniably a lot of content to manage.

In her keynote address, Ms. Campbell spoke about how the Library of Congress is leveraging linked data technologies in three key areas:

1. Managing existing collections
2. Maintaining the LoC’s role as a leader in the distribution of canonical information
3. Fulfilling the mission to collect, preserve, and provide access to a more digital collection

The keynote in its entirety, is presented below.

To read more about one specific linked data initiative at the Library of Congress, check out this recent series about the Recollections Project.

For more great keynotes, case studies, and insight into how Semantic Web can make a difference in business, consider attending SemTechBiz UK, SemTechBiz DC, or the Semantic Media Summit in NYC.

Rachel Frick recently shared her thoughts on the expanding reach of linked data in the library community as part of the latest issue of the Council on Library and Information Resources journal. Frick writes, “Efforts and interest surrounding linked data and the semantic web are growing rapidly in the digital library community. I am often asked, ‘What is [the Digital Library Foundation] DLF doing in relation to linked data?’ As a community-driven organization, we need to identify where it makes the most sense for the DLF to engage, and where we can contribute for the greatest benefit. Linked data is about ‘using the Web to connect related data that wasn’t previously linked, or using the Web to lower the barriers to linking data currently linked using other methods,’ according to Linkeddata.org.” Read more

Europeana, a collection of digital resources from Europe’s countless museums, libraries, and archives has launched data.europeana.eu as part of its “ongoing effort of making its metadata available as Linked Open Data on the Web. It allows others to access metadata collected from Europeana providers, via standard Web technologies, enrich this metadata and give this enriched metadata back to the providers. Links between Europeana resources and other resources in the Linked Data Web will enable discovery of semantically related resources, as, say, when two artworks are created by artists who are related to each other.” Read more

A new blog post discusses some “big news for folks interested in Library Linked Data: CrossRef has made the metadata for 46 million Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) available as Linked Data. DOIs are heavily used in the publishing space to uniquely identify electronic documents (largely scholarly journal articles). CrossRef is a consortium of roughly 3,000 publishers, and is a big player in the academic publishing marketplace. So practically what this means is that all the places in the scholarly publishing ecosystem where DOIs are present (caveat below), it’s now possible to use the Web to retrieve metadata associated with that electronic document.” Read more

The University of Iowa Libraries is looking for a Web Application Developer in Iowa City: “The Web Application Developer provides application development and support for central library systems, including some commercial and several locally developed solutions. The incumbent will provide programming support to develop web 2.0 semantic Web and other emerging Web technologies and assist with integrating them into software systems. The position is in the Applications and Web Services Unit of the Library Information Technology Department and reports to the Unit Head.” Read more

This resource from Michele Pasin is an excellent tool for Python developers. As Pasin puts it: “I’m reporting on a recent survey I made in the context of a Linked Data project I’m working on, SAILS. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a data model and language which is quickly gaining momentum in the open-data and data-integration worlds. In SAILS we’re developing a prototype for rdf-data manipulation and querying, but since the final application (of which the rdf-components is part of) will be written in Python and Django, in what follows I tried to gather information about all the existing libraries and frameworks for doing rdf-programming using python.” Read more