Cataloging and Metadata Services is a member of the Linked Data for Production (LD4P) project.  LD4P is a collaboration between six institutions (Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Library of Congress, Princeton, and Stanford) to begin the transition of technical services production workflows to ones based in Linked Open Data (LOD). Princeton's subproject is focused on BIBFRAME and annotations in relationship to the library of Jacques Derrida.

The first phase of the project will involve collaboration with colleagues from Columbia University Library, Cornell University Library, and the Bibliographic Standards Committee of the American Library Association’s Rare Books & Manuscripts Section (RBMS) to develop models, vocabularies, and best practices for the item-level description of special collections materials using RDF. An emphasis on the item as a physical entity is central to this subproject because standards for copy-specific metadata have not yet been adequately defined by other linked data efforts in the library domain.

In later phases of the project, Princeton will create original resource descriptions for a representative selection of items in the Derrida collection that include personal dedications addressed to Derrida. The items with dedications were significant to Derrida: he filled several rooms with them, stored in alphabetical order by author. The relationships encoded in these dedications will allow project participants to produce an RDF data set that can be used by scholars who are interested in studying Derrida’s social and intellectual networks.

Objectives

• Evaluate existing ontologies and models, specifically BIBFRAME and the Web Annotation Data Model
• Work with the RBMS Bibliographic Standards Committee and Cornell University Library to define an extension ontology (RBMO) for the description of rare materials
• Transform and convert EAD data and MARC records into BIBFRAME for a representative selection of items in the Derrida collection
• Create original or enhanced RDF descriptions for items in the previously identified subset of the Derrida collection that contain personal dedications
• Prototype a lightweight, standards-based online editing tool for linked data creation and enhancement

Why it Matters

• There are broader trends toward implementing LOD in various industries, and increasingly in other libraries; it is the wave of the future
• For us, LOD represents a fundamental shift away from record-based bibliographic metadata and thus represents a significant undertaking, still in its early days
• Our participation in early BIBFRAME testing, in the Library of Congress' Implementation Testbed, and now in LD4P places us among the leaders of the field
• Transitioning to LOD promises to empower our researchers and to allow for interesting and unexpected discoveries

Princeton's LD4P Core Group

Joyce Bell
Jennifer Baxmeyer
Lidia Santarelli (from Feb. 2017)
Luiza Wainer (from Jan. 2018)
Peter Green
Regine Heberlein
Tim Thompson (until Mar. 2017)