Technical Report
 

Linked Data Report and Recommendations for Oregon State University Libraries and Press

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https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/technical_reports/pr76f7640

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  • Executive Summary: Oregon State University Libraries and Press (OSULP) demonstrates the value of openness in a variety of ways. We worked with faculty to pass an open access policy to provide the broadest possible access to university scholarship. We teach faculty and students to use data tools that promote the sharing and distribution of research data. We help students make their theses, dissertations, final research projects, and data openly available. We work with scholars to publish digital humanities projects, conference proceedings, textbooks, journals and other research outputs on the open web. We have a commitment to the use of open source software and make our code openly available; and, with the development of Oregon Digital as a linked data platform, we openly share our metadata for the widest possible machine distribution and reuse on the open web. As a production-ready metadata solution with the potential for improving user access to related resources, the use of linked data within Oregon Digital and the ScholarsArchive@OSU institutional repository remains a promising and worthwhile endeavor. Its use ensures normalization and consistency of metadata and enables quality faceted browsing of digital objects within discovery interfaces. Longer term, our use of linked data has the potential to link our digital content with other data on the open web, providing users with added context for items within our collections and connecting them with related resources that reside outside our own collections. Also, the fact that linked data is more easily understood by computers gives that data an opportunity to interact with other systems and data sources more intelligently. As one librarian I spoke with said, “Once you have semantic concepts embedded into your data, things like authority control, data sharing, alternative language support – these things become easier.” Given the significant investment OSULP has already made in linked data by building Oregon Digital on a linked data platform, its future promise of reducing silos of library information, and the research value of this work, I propose that OSULP should continue to create, maintain and publish linked data for, at least, our digital collections and, in the future, the institutional repository. The ability for OSULP to fully benefit from the work we’ve already done depends on our ability to make it interoperable with other linked datasets on the web. OSULP should also begin tracking the emerging use of linked data in library catalogs and discovery services. To do so, OSULP would benefit by hiring a “next generation” cataloger/metadata librarian and increasing the pool of staff with an understanding of linked data and its uses. The next cataloger/metadata person hired by OSULP should be someone with linked data expertise, familiar with BIBFRAME and the RDF data model, who also has knowledge of MARC, dcterms, and other current cataloging standards and metadata schemes. We also need more staff with at least a basic level of linked data expertise who can take incoming metadata and prepare it for bulk ingest into our digital asset management systems. Training on basic linked data concepts and the tools we’ve put in place should be provided to library faculty and staff who are in positions to take on more of this work. SCARC could take a leadership position for the library in terms of metadata in general, and linked data specifically.
  • Report to Faye Chadwell, Donald and Delpha Campbell University Librarian and OSU Press Director.
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