2020-July-20 Links All the Way Down: Emblematica..., Data Sources track (Cindy Tian; Greta Heng)
Channel: LD4
Date: 2020-07-17

Links All the Way Down: Emblematica as a LOD Case Study, Presenters: Cindy Tian (Notre Dame Law Library) and Greta Heng (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Co-authors: Timothy W. Cole and Myung-Ja Han (University of Illinois)
Linked Open Data (LOD) infrastructure relies on well-designed ontologies, frameworks and identifier best practices. But the finest infrastructure is worthless if you cannot reconcile your metadata to link to appropriate LOD authorities, and (importantly) if you cannot connect these authorities one to another in ways that improve end user services. Emblematica Online, a digital library portal which provides integrated discovery and access to 1,388 digitized emblem books from six major international rare book emblem collections, was used as a case study to examine reconciliation obstacles and illustrate potential connectedness benefits. Book-level descriptions of digitized emblem books derived from legacy cataloging were analyzed. String values & codes for names, languages, subjects, and genres were searched using LOD Authority APIs (VIAF, Library of Congress, Getty) to discover entity URI links. Results highlighted the challenges of reconciling legacy cataloging metadata, some of which were overcome in a second pass by extending and refining processing logic. But results also highlighted the limitations of legacy-based authorities. Name and subject cataloging practices have varied over time and between Europe and North America. Subject authorities vary in degree of hierarchy and redundancies. There are trade-offs in historical choices that have impact today (e.g., between simple and compound subject headings). These trade-offs and other differences can impact potential user services. This research suggests that leveraging links between authority records -- e.g., between LCSH and RAMEAU subject authorities, and between VIAF and DNB name authorities--can help enhance user services. This lightning talk will share the study results, illustrate approaches that we found improved reconciliation, and highlight why authorities in combination are better than over reliance on single authorities. This case study provides another data point for others implementing LOD to enhance the discovery and value of digitized special collection library resources.