How Penn's Librarians are Using Linked Data to Make the Web Better | Penn Libraries

"For the past year, Camden and a team of linked data editors, including Digital Library Strategist and Metadata Architect John Mark Ockerbloom and Head of Metadata Research Jim Hahn, have been harnessing the power of linked data to connect people with information about the Penn Libraries and its collections, even if those people never visit our website. As part of a pilot project run by the Program for Cooperative Cataloging, the team has been carefully and systematically adding information about materials in the Penn Libraries’ collections to Wikidata, an open and easily editable type of linked data dataset that is part of the suite of products created by the Wikimedia Foundation that also includes Wikipedia. To date, the Penn Libraries team has added over 5,000 new “items”--each representing an individual serial, publication, person, institution, academic department, or related thing of interest to library users--and edited over 7,000 others. The Penn Libraries is just one of 74 institutions involved in this project. ..."