Role of national bibliographic agencies in linked data environment

1. Role of national bibliographic agencies in linked data environment Gordon Dunsire Presented to staff of the Bibliothèquenationale de France, Paris, 25 Apr 2013

2. W3C LLD XG: Key recommendations I • That library leaders identify sets of data as possible candidates for early exposure as Linked Data and foster a discussion about Open Data and rights; • That library standards bodies increase library participation in Semantic Web standardization, develop library data standards that are compatible with Linked Data, and disseminate best-practice design patterns tailored to library Linked Data;

3. W3C LLD XG: Key recommendations II • That data and systems designers design enhanced user services based on Linked Data capabilities, create URIs for the items in library datasets, develop policies for managing RDF vocabularies and their URIs, and express library data by re-using or mapping to existing Linked Data vocabularies; • That librarians and archivists preserve Linked Data element sets and value vocabularies and apply library experience in curation and long-term preservation to Linked Data datasets.

4. Trends • More focus on the statement than the record • The record is a set of metadata statements about the same thing • More focus on breadth than depth of description • Is there a “perfect” bibliographic description? • Is it necessary?

5. Cultural resources • Create, publish, maintain, preserve identifiers (URIs) for national cultural resources, to: • Avoid duplication • Encourage collaborative description • By professionals, the crowd, machines • Continue existing roles in a global context • Promotion and preservation of national heritage

6. Authority control • Create, publish, maintain, preserve identifiers and labels for people, places, events, etc. associated with the nation, to: • Provide national and cultural authority and visibility • Encourage linked data across domains and communities • Also interested in people, places, events, etc. • Continue existing roles in a global context

7. Authority • Provenance is important • Anyone can say Anything about Any thing (AAA) • No intrinsic test of truth – only inconsistency • “Who said that?” • Competing data from many different sources: social networks, publishers and sellers, governments, propagandists, etc. • Library data generally of higher quality • Ethos of trust, neutrality, etc. • Can we keep it that way?

8. Heritage • Linked data vocabularies should be preserved for future generations • Element sets of local schema • Value vocabularies of local “authorities” • Datasets of local bibliographic descriptions • In the global environment, every focus is local • Including regional, national, local, specialist • In the local environment, every scope is global