This presentation reflects on my first year in a newly created Linked Data Librarian position at Middle Tennessee State University. I will discuss the creation of the role, initial expectations, and my experience learning linked data while exploring future implementations and building professional connections. The talk will highlight challenges, lessons learned, and insights gained along the way, offering a practical perspective for others beginning their own linked data journey.
The Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF) has few tools for identifying duplicates. Since February 2026, Wikiproject P244 maintenance has worked as part of the newly-founded EMCO program to use Wikidata to identify and merge more than 160 pairs of duplicate LCNAF records. This lightning talk will discuss our process, the work that remains, and how you can help, whether you can edit the name authority file or not!
Linking a place authority record to a usable geographic shape is often a manual, time-consuming step in collection management systems — yet the linked data is frequently already there. This lightning talk demos a small, open, dependency-free (Python standard library only) pipeline built for Axiell Collections at the Rijksmuseum, which takes a Wikidata QID, follows its OpenStreetMap relation (P402) or point coordinate (P625), fetches the geometry via Overpass, and converts it into a ready-to-import Axiell record — with no manual GIS work required. The real value is in the edge cases: real OpenStreetMap and Wikidata data rarely behaves as cleanly as the happy path suggests, and this talk walks through a few concrete examples of how the pipeline handles them without silently producing a wrong result. It also processes hundreds of records in a single batch, with a clear audit trail of what needs human review. These are exactly the kinds of real-world data quirks any institution connecting Wikidata/OSM to a legacy collection system will run into. Attendees will leave with a concrete, reusable pattern for this kind of linked-data-to-CMS pipeline, regardless of which collection management system they use.
The benefits of linked data in the cataloging community are often tied to improved search and discovery for library users, but in this lightning talk, I share a small use case of linked data also benefiting us, the catalogers creating the linked data. To tackle a backlog of CDs and vinyl requiring original cataloging at the UCLA Library, I worked with music catalogers to create a Python tool that could retrieve not only existing metadata from Discogs - a widely used crowdsourced music database - to generate a basic MARC record; the tool could also look beyond this database to incorporate authorized access points from the Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF) by using identifiers across Discogs, Wikidata, and LCNAF - essentially, using the linked data that we've collectively created to reduce manual effort in cataloging work. This project thus highlights how the cataloging community's investment in linked data can benefit not just our users, but also ourselves, allowing us to leverage community-created data to enhance our own metadata workflows.
