For the program’s first cohort, CLIR is now recruiting six data curation fellows in cooperation with its partner institutions: Indiana University, Lehigh University, McMaster University, Purdue University, the University of California Los Angeles, and the University of Michigan.
Information about the program and position descriptions are available at http://www.clir.org/fellowships/datacuration. Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis until all positions are filled, but no later than June 30, 2012.
The White House Blog reported last week that the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy has released two Requests for Information (RFI), “soliciting public input on long term preservation of and public access to the results of federally funded research, including digital data and peer-reviewed scholarly publications.” Read the rest of this entry »
In a recent post at danbri.org, Dan Brinkley documents some of his work on NoTube (a European research project exploring Semantic Web and TV), reflects on the possibilities of linking bibliographic data with other web content, and calls for a contest to engage researchers in linked TV and bibliographic data.
Responding to Brinkley’s call via the DPLA listserv, Karen Coyle observes:
“A big and powerful chunk of knowledge organization that is just begging for exploitation is the fact that library records have classification numbers and subject headings from thesauri. All of this could now be correlated with an analysis of the full text. It’s only another step to associate this same information with non-library materials. The classifications have the advantage of being organized knowledge with implicit class membership and lots of interesting sibling relationships. What libraries have is not complete nor perfect, but it’s a seed to be built on, something that doesn’t exist when you do keyword indexing without any semantics.”
As part of LODLAM-DC, Jon Voss will deliver a free talk called “An Introduction to Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives, & Museums” on Friday, September 16.
Based on an earlier talk given at NYPL Labs, Voss’s presentation will “explore the fundamental elements of Linked Open Data and discover how rapidly growing access to metadata within the world’s libraries, archives and museums is opening exciting new possibilities for understanding our past, and may help in predicting our future.”
This event is free and open to the public, so register soon. For a sneak peek, check out this slideshow from Voss’s earlier talk.
This just in: the New York Times recently launched Longitude, an interactive map of the day’s news leveraging Linked Open Data, as a featured project of its larger beta620 website.
As described by Evan Sandhaus, its developer, Longitude links NYT subject headings to geographic and corporate or biographical data from Geonames and Freebase:
“When you open Longitude you’ll see a number of “Times T” pins plotted out in a Google Map. The locations for these pins were all derived from Geonames. Click on any pin and you’ll be presented with a pop-up balloon containing a list of the ten most recent, relevant Times articles. But wait, there’s more! For some locations such as Missouri, your balloon will have one or two additional tabs: “Natives” and/or “Companies.” Click on one of these tabs and you’ll be presented with list of locally-born people and locally-headquartered organizations. You can even view Times articles for these people and organizations.”
Read Sandhaus’s pitch for Longitude, in which he also promises future posts about technical details of the app.
In an article for Wired Magazine titled “Why Open Data Alone is Not Enough,” Jesse Lichtenstein acknowledges the data divide and suggests how it could be bridged:
“The concern that open data may simply empower the empowered is not an argument against open data; it’s an argument against looking at open data as an end in itself. Massive data dumps and even friendly online government portals are insufficient. Ordinary people need to know what information is available, and they need the training to be conversant in it. And if people are to have anything more than theoretical access to the information, it needs to be easy and cheap to use. That means investing in the kinds of organizations doing outreach, advocacy, and education in the communities least familiar with the benefits of data transparency. If we want truly open government, we still have to do the hard work of addressing basic and stubborn inequalities. However freely it flows, the data alone isn’t enough.”
Linked Data and Libraries 2011 was held at the British Library Conference Centre in London on Thursday, July 14, 2011. Below find a selection of sessions and slideshows.
View the afternoon session below, or view the morning session here.
On the day of the conference, the British Library also introduced their new approach to publishing the British National Bibliography using linked data practices. Users can now preview the first subset of the LOD BNB, including books published or distributed in the UK since 2005, via the search service, the describe endpoint, and the SPARQL endpoint. Below are slides from a presentation by Neil Wilson, who heads the British Library’s Metadata Services, outlining the process behind creating the library’s LOD model.
Play with example records of an organization and a publication from the BNB preview, or check out the data model. To view more slides from Linked Data and Libraries 2011—including contributions from the Library of Congress and the University of Münster—visit the conference’s resource page.
Laura Campbell, CIO of the Library of Congress, delivered the keynote address at the 2011 SemTech Conference in San Francisco, CA. Her talk focused on “how linked data is helping us to do more with less” while managing the Library’s existing collections; maintaining its role as a leader in the distribution of canonical information; and following its mission to collect, preserve, and provide access to a born digital collection.
During her talk, Campbell said she hoped the takeaway would be that ”We need to get very clever about new methods of doing our mission, new methods of executing both getting the material and managing it and providing access to it.”
David Weinberger, senior researcher at the Berkman Center, filmed these interviews at the LOD-LAM Summit in San Francisco on June 2-3, 2011.
Want to join the conversation? Respond to the W3C Linked Library Data Incubator Group‘s call for public comment on the draft of their report. Feedback can sent as comments to individual sections posted on their dedicated blog or by email to an archived public mailing list at public-lld@w3.org using descriptive subject lines such as ‘[COMMENTS] “Benefits” section.’
