Smithsonian Libraries and Archives & Wikidata: Using Linked Open Data to Connect Smithsonian Information – Smithsonian Libraries / Unbound

"Libraries have created and curated metadata that describes their collections for a very long time. It is the very essence of the cataloging and metadata profession.  This past year, because of the pandemic, the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives initiated a unit-wide pilot project to explore if and how a linked open data platform offered by Wikimedia Foundation could reconceptualize how authority control could be transitioned to identity management.

Propelled by the basic principles prescribed by Tim Berners-Lee, library staff laid the groundwork to transition from a text-centric to a data-centric orientation in 2019. This involves changing bibliographic description to structured data, based on a linked open data standard and preparing the Libraries and Archives’ MARC data, the current standard used for machine-readable cataloging records, for transformation to RDF triples. RDF, or Resource Description Framework, uses URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) for objects and property in a structured way. This allows for the creation of rich networks of meaningful data and takes us from the flat world of the textual into a new world of possibilities with linked data...."