Library Discovery Enhanced with Linked Open Data

Earlier this week, as part of the IGeLU & ELUNA Show & Tell Webinar series, Steve Meyer from UW-Madison presented his work around enhancing library discovery by displaying info cards about the authors of bibliographic works using linked data.

The session focused on how linked data can be used to connect the authority work in library catalogs to data sets on the web that are not traditionally curated by libraries. Using these data sets enables the library catalog to place bibliographic works in the broader context of their authors’ lives and provide extremely relevant data for evaluating the research value of each item.

UW-Madison’s experimental linked data enhancement is enabled by Alma’s JSON LD integration and draws data from Getty Vocabularies, DBpedia, and Wikidata.

This session is aimed at the technically savvy librarians and developers out there, and assumes prior knowledge with core linked data principles and technologies and with general web development methodologies.