Semantic Library

With all the distractions of my move across the world, it wasn’t until now (thanks, Jenna!) that I saw “Discovering Linked Data” was published in Library Journal last month. I aimed to cover a few different areas that Linked Data may be useful in, especially research support and discovery layers for catalogues, areas that I was working in at the time of writing the article. I’m really happy with how it turned out.

Open catalogue data is an an issue that arose when I first started working in libraries. I worked in a multicultural music library. I catalogued in more than 60 languages, all original, because our systems didn’t interface with cooperative cataloguing systems (and we had a non-standard cataloguing record, to boot), and the uniqueness of our catalogue in Australia did not make it worthwhile. But surely, there would have been other libraries across the world that we could and should have shared our data with. And I would have liked to share my work, knowing that we were duplicating work with our sister library in another city. We would have been able to identify collection strengths across the world, share resources, and perhaps even find partners to share our collections instead of having to do extensive legwork in obtaining materials in the first place.

I think Linked Data will have a big impact on larger institutions, but smaller ones also have a lot to gain by sharing in ways that were not possible or practical before.

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