Using
Linked Library DatainWorking Research Notes
Ryan Shaw
School of Information and Library Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Our goal
is to provide a “medium by which much
valuable information may become a sortof common property among those who
can appreciate and use it”
Thoms, William J. 1849.
“Notes and Queries.” Notes and Queries s1-I(1):1–3.
http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/content/s1-I/1/1.full.pdf+html

Common property
bibliographic data

annotations

finished products

crowdsourcing

collaborative authoring

Focusing on notes

Documentary editing
Editors prepare collections of documents:
letters, articles, diaries, essays, etc.
Printed volumes provide context for
better understanding subjects’
experiences and general milieu throughfootnotes, images, chronologies, articles

Documentary editing:workflow
1. Gather documents
2. Contextualize select items
3. Publish final product4. Repeat as funding allows

Case study:
Emma
GoldmanPapersProblems
Published volumes & necessary work are expensive
Lack of space for all footnotes
Much of research done is either glossed over infootnotes or not included at all
Fact checking
Falsification or dead ends
Tangential biographical details
Preservation & legacy

Patrick—Lenin:
Had any of his family
members beside hisbrother, been imprisoned?
What was the book he had
written on ‘political
economy’ that was used in
Russsian Universities?
New York (Evening?) Post,
September 1918 editorial
on IWW verdict for thehuge IWW trial in Chicago.

Sources consulted,
notes taken based on
findings
Notes stored in a
Word documents?
Yellow notebook?
Email?
Negative conclusion
reached to question,
but no one will everknowWhat has changed forresearchers?
Free textStructured blocks

Implicit people,
places, events

Explicit linkableentities

Filing cabinets

Open accessBenefits
Connections linking topics are freed from the minds ofeditors & researchers and indexed for anyone to seeStandardized records of work can easily be revisitedfrom within a project or from outside
New way of seeing the outer edges of humanities
research
Evidence of intense, often messy, scholarship behindconcise, clean footnotesDocuments
Zotero for
document metadataHigh quality,
zoomable scans
Transcripts inHTML withinterface toannotate passagesof text

Topics
Primary methodof indexing items
Classified by typeInterface forclustering andmerging

NotesMost difficult part of the project
Notes are messy, and purposefully so
How to model something so chaotic &idiosyncratic?
Goals: Easy to use; flexible but consistentNotesDescription
Status: Open, closed,
hibernating
Assigned users
Sections
Citation withoptional notes
Stored as HTML
Revision history

Design principles
Minimal amount of “friction” for researchers
Flexibility for different work habits
Consistency in data models
Existing technology wherever possible
Adherence to web standards

Open source
https://github.com/editorsnotes
HTTP API built on Django web framework
PostgreSQL database
Haystack for full-text searching
Zotero for document description
Google Refine for duplicate detection
Mozilla Persona for ID management

Roadmap
Better sorting, filtering and aggregatingof notes
Improved naming control anddiscoverability
Temporal, geospatial, and relational
visualization

topicnames

candidate
URIs

statements(triples)Lessons learned
Possible to automatically harvest relevant linked
data from libraries and other institutions
Editorial control over the harvested data needs tobe better integrated into the note-taking process
Did not adequately demonstrate the benefits ofstructured data
Do not simply aggregate and edit linked data—need to usefully exploit it to researchers’ benefit.

In-process
reconciliation
Editors create topics tolabel and index theirnotes; later reconciled toexternal identifiers in a
separate batch process.

Editors fluidly create,link to, and reconcile
topics within thenote-taking process.

OldNew

Motivating
structured data use
enabled storing andediting of structured
data, but provided noincentive for editors to
do thisstoring and editing
structured data
immediately enablessorting and filteringand creating simple
visualizations

OldNew

Sorting & filteringSorting & filtering
Filter and sort notes not only using the dates ofthe cited documents (as they currently can), butalso using:locations and birth and death dates of thepeople referenced in the notes
locations and dates of existence of theorganizations referenced
locations and dates of the events referenced

Visualizing notes
A note on Dhanvanthi Rama Rau & theFourth International Conference on Planned
Parenthood can become viewable as:a map of specific locations in Stockholm andBombay
a timeline of dates associated with theconferencea network of relationships among people andorganizations.

Expected benefits
Working notes become repurposable
Working notes become more discoverable
Shift of focus from one-shot product tocontinuous data curation processThank You
We are grateful for funding from:The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Coleman Fung
Ryan Shawryanshaw@unc.edu

Project information

http://ecai.org/mellon2010/

Project site

http://editorsnotes.org/

Source code

https://github.com/editorsnotes