LUX: Illuminating the Collections of Yale’s Museums... • From prototypes to production
Channel: LD4
Date: 2021-07-20

LUX: Illuminating the Collections of Yale’s Museums, Libraries, and Archives via Linked Open Usable Data, Timothy Thompson and Robert Sanderson
For the past four years, Yale University has been laying the groundwork for a new cross-collections discovery environment—a unified gateway to the holdings of the university’s libraries, archives, and museums. The emerging system, called LUX: Yale Collections Discovery, will empower users to identify and engage with items of interest in Yale’s physical and digital collections. Leveraging linked open usable data (LOUD), LUX will uncover relationships among items and entities, inviting exploration of the underlying networks that connect them to each other.

Metadata modeling for LUX has focused on establishing a common frame of reference for its different domains (art, natural history, archives, and libraries). During an initial phase, a common JSON format was developed for use in a prototype Solr index. In 2019, the university received a Mellon Foundation grant to advance its metadata harmonization and reconciliation efforts, with a focus on named entities and subjects. The project is now transitioning to the Linked Art model, built on the CIDOC-CRM ontology and guided by the principles of LOUD, as its lingua franca. The work of metadata mapping, modeling, and reconciliation has also been guided by an evolving organizational structure that provides a model for collaboration across collections and repositories.

From prototypes to production: the continuing story of discovery in the Linked Data For Production: Closing the Loop grant, Huda Khan
Incorporating linked data into discovery interfaces in production is an important part of the Linked Data for Production: Closing the Loop (LD4P3) grant. To achieve this goal, we have adopted a two pronged approach: (a) a continuation of the exploration of ideas for linked data integration using a user-centered design approach, similar to our prototyping and evaluation work in Linked Data For Production: Pathway to Implementation (LD4P2) grant, and (b) a process of conversation and coordination with the relevant stakeholders to assess which features can best support end-users and are viable for implementing in a production system. For example: At Cornell, we started with the Discogs prototype generated in LD4P2 and received the approval to modify and move that work into the production catalog. In the area of new design and development, we have explored creating entity-specific pages for authors and subjects within a Blacklight catalog. These author and subjects pages display a unified view of information and resources relevant to these entities across both library and external linked data sources. In this presentation, attendees with be provided with an overview of both our continuing design, development, and usability evaluation work and our process for engaging relevant stakeholders to suggest these ideas for the production catalog.