**** Please excuse cross-postings ****


The ALCTS Metadata Interest Group will hold a meeting at the ALA Midwinter in Chicago on Sunday, February 1, 2015 from 8:30 to 10am in McCormick Place West Room W176c.  The meeting will include two presentations.


Jennifer Wright and Matt Carruthers from the University of Michigan Libraries will present "Breaking the Bottleneck: Automating the Reconciliation of Named Entities to the Library of Congress Name Authority File."


"At the University of Michigan Libraries, we have developed an intuitive, straight-forward process for automating the reconciliation of named entities against the Library of Congress Name Authority File.  Using OpenRefine and stable, publicly available APIs, the process automatically searches the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) for matches to personal and corporate names, looks for a Library of Congress source authority record in the matching VIAF cluster, and extracts the authorized heading.  The end result is a dataset, exportable from OpenRefine, with the corresponding authorized LCNAF heading paired with the original name heading, along with a link to the authority record on lccn.loc.gov<http://lccn.loc.gov/>.  This process is automated and requires no programming knowledge or support from developers.  Using this process, we have been able to reduce the time taken to reconcile name headings drastically.


In this presentation, we will lead attendees through the quick and easily generalizable process, and explain what is happening behind the scenes.  We will also discuss the impact it has had on our local workflows, the limitations of the process, and detail how attendees can use this process themselves to aid in their authority control processes."


Nancy Fallgren and Barbara Bushman from the National Library of Medicine will present "Linked Data Initiatives at NLM."


"In January 2014, following an environmental scan of linked data at peer institutions and a survey of NLM's "datascape", NLM formed the Linked Data Infrastructure Working Group to investigate the potential for publishing NLM linked data, determine best practices for publishing NLM linked data, and prioritize linked data projects.  The Working Group was charged to develop and build an infrastructure for transforming, storing and publishing NLM linked data beginning with transforming MeSH as a linked data pilot.  This presentation will review the progress of our pilot project to convert MeSH XML to MeSH RDF.  We will discuss our collaborative process, the technical and organizational issues we tackled, and the future of linked data at NLM."


We look forward to seeing you all there!


Program co-chairs,



Santi Thompson

Head of Digital Repository Services, University of Houston Libraries

(713) 743-9685<tel:%28713%29%20743-9685> | [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>



Liz Woolcott

Digital Discovery Librarian, Utah State University

(435) 797-9458<tel:%28435%29%20797-9458> | [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>