Linked Data for libraries, archives and museums

CHICAGO — Libraries, archives and museums are facing up to the challenge of providing access to fast-growing collections while managing constrained budgets. Key to this is the creation, linking and publishing of good quality metadata, which allows library collections to be discovered, accessed and disseminated in a sustainable manner.  In “Linked Data for Libraries, Archives and Museums: How to Clean, Link and Publish your Metadata,” published by ALA Editions, metadata experts Seth van Hooland and Ruben Verborgh introduce the core concepts of metadata standards and Linked Data and show how they can be applied to existing metadata. Giving readers the tools and understanding to achieve maximum results with limited resources, this book covers such crucial topics as:

• the value of metadata;
• metadata creation, including architecture, data models and standards;
• metadata cleaning;
• metadata reconciliation;
• metadata enrichment through Linked Data and named-entity recognition;
• importing and exporting metadata;
• ensuring a sustainable publishing model.

van Hooland is an assistant professor at the Universite libre de Bruxelles (ULB). Following a post-doc position at the University Carlos III of Madrid, he joined the Information and Communication Science Department at ULB and became the academic responsible for their Master in Information Science. In the spring semester of 2014, he taught a special course on linked data at the Information School of the University of Washington. He is also active as a consultant in the document and records management domain for both public and private organizations.

Verborgh is a researcher in semantic hypermedia at Ghent University - iMinds, Belgium. He explores the connection between semantic web technologies and the Web's architectural properties, with the ultimate goal of building more intelligent clients. Along the way, he has become fascinated by linked data, REST/hypermedia, web APIs and related technologies. He is the author of a book on the interactive data transformation tool OpenRefine and several publications on Web-related topics in international journals.

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