Program Announcement: LITA/ALCTS Linked Library Data Interest Group Meeting at ALA Midwinter in Denver, Colorado

Time: Saturday, February 10, 2018 8:30-10:00 AM
Location: Colorado Convention Center, Rm 705/707
Session Name: "I Know Very Well How I Got My Name": Linked Data Authority Projects

Please join us for three exciting presentations on linked data name authority projects. After our speaker presentations, the group will have an opportunity for questions and discussion.

Presentations:

1. "What works and what doesn't? Name Reconciliation Work and Management of Digitized Special Collections"

As libraries transform and publish their data as linked open data, they face a number of challenges. Included among these challenges are two key questions: How can we recognize and reconcile named entities already described in established linked open data sources, and how can we best manage unique names often found in local special collections’ data, but not found elsewhere? Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Linked Open Data (LOD) for Digitized Special Collections project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library has provided an opportunity to address these two questions through lessons learned from three of the University Library’s digitized special collections, two image-based theater collections, and a TEI-encoded text collection. This presentation illustrates how the project has combined manual and automatic reconciliation processes to improve the matching results, and an approach to creating and publishing local name authority files in an LOD format.

Speaker: 
Myung-Ja (“MJ”) K. Han is a Metadata Librarian and Associate Professor of Library Administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on interoperability of metadata, metadata modeling, bibliographic control in the digital library environment, and the use of Linked Open Data in library service architectures and implementations.

2. "Western Name Authority File: Linking People and Corporate Bodies"

The Western Name Authority File (WNAF) project was funded by an IMLS planning grant in early 2016 to explore and pilot a system for developing a collaborative, regional authority file for personal names and corporate bodies from digital collection metadata. We presented the background and issues to be explored at the Linked Library Data Interest Group at ALA Annual 2016, and now as we near the end of the two year grant, we will provide an update on the data model we've chosen for our vocabulary, what we've done to collect and reconcile names from a variety of partner institutions, and the emerging vocabulary workflows that we're in the process of developing in order to make the WNAF available as linked open data.

Speakers: 
Anna Neatrour is the Digital Initiatives Librarian at the University of Utah J. Willard Marriott Library. She previously was a metadata librarian at the Marriott Library and at the Mountain West Digital Library. She received her MLIS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Jeremy Myntti is Head of Digital Library Services at the University of Utah J. Willard Marriott Library. This position allows him the opportunity to work closely with faculty and staff who are digitizing, creating metadata, and digitally preserving library and partner content. He received his MLIS from the University of Alabama.

3. "Introducing Cedar: a Linked Data Authority Service at the University of Houston Libraries"

In 2016, as part of the development of a new digital access and preservation ecosystem, the University of Houston Libraries established Cedar, a local linked data thesaurus. Using SKOS, Cedar includes terms for subjects, individual and organization names, place names, and time periods found in the Libraries’ digital library and electronic theses and dissertations (ETD) collection from the UH institutional repository. While Cedar includes terms from national authority files, it also accommodates locally created terms with emphasis on personal, organization, and place names. Over the last two years, the metadata unit has deployed the software and developed strategies and workflows for term entry and use in our digital production workflows. Additionally, we collaborated with our cataloging unit to leverage this system to perform authority control in traditional MARC cataloging for ETDs in a more efficient way. This presentation will outline the development of the tool focusing on the thesaurus design, the workflow of creating local authority records, the use of the application, as well as lessons learned and future directions.
 
Speakers: 
Xiping Liu is a Resource Description Librarian at the University of Houston M.D. Anderson Library. She is responsible for original cataloging library materials in all formats. She received her MLIS from Rutgers University. 

Anne Washington is the Metadata Librarian at the University of Houston M.D. Anderson Library. She is responsible for managing metadata creation and maintenance for the University of Houston Digital Library. She received her MLIS from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Andrew Weidner is the Metadata Services Coordinator at the University of Houston M.D. Anderson Library where he oversees digitization and metadata for digital collections. He received his MLIS from the University of North Texas.