Linked data for libraries, archives and museums: How to clean, link and publish your metadata

Digitisation projects are the norm now in libraries, but are you getting the most out of the data? You may not be. This highly practical book will shed some light on how you can enrich and streamline the metadata you are creating and help ensure that our precious cultural heritage has greater exposure beyond the walls of our institutions. Drawing on the industry experience of a linked data university lecturer and consultant, as well as a researcher in semantic hypermedia, Linked data for libraries, archives and museums is a practical guide to publishing quality metadata as linked data. After an introduction to basic metadata principles, the authors explore how to model, clean, reconcile, enrich and publish metadata to become a valuable part of the Semantic Web as linked data. They also delve into the topics of controlled vocabularies (SKOS, RDFS and OWL), crowdsourcing, APIs, data profiling and code. The goal of the book is ‘the sustainable publication of linked data’ and to ‘lower the technical barrier towards understanding linked data’. It does this by providing the reader with conceptual and practical understanding. The book’s accompanying website provides the reader with downloadable metadata files that correspond to the case studies and exercises in the book. These practical hands-on tasks go a long way to achieving the goal of lowering the technical barrier to understanding linked data by providing the reader with a means to do, conceptualise and understand, rather than just read and theorise. Whilst at times highly complex, this seven-chapter book by no means has to be read in chapter sequence or in its entirety.One canflick through sections or skip themaltogether if they seem irrelevant. Another positive feature of this book is that, even though its provenance is the UK, it is by no means worthwhile only to professionals in the UK. The book provides case studies from around the globe, including one fromAustralia’s very own PowerhouseMuseum. Some of us assume that linked data are coming, but the reality is, as this book underlines, that it is already here. If we do not make the effort to understand its theoretical concepts as it develops, we will be left in the dark, asking why we failed to make our collections and valuable data discoverable. If you are a cataloguer or similar metadata enthusiast wanting to broaden your knowledge and become more at home with linked data, then this is one book worth reading, especially now that libraries around the world are implementing RDA, and with BIBFRAME on the way.