The National Library Board’s (NLB) Entity Data Service (EDS) is a linked data initiative built on NLB’s knowledge graph, comprising some 2.6 million transformed records from the NLB and National Archives of Singapore (NAS) collections, with entities representing people, organisations and places described across these collections.
This presentation will introduce the origins of the EDS and how entities are managed within the knowledge graph. Using examples of Person entities, it will demonstrate how entity resolution brings together different descriptions and references to the same person across disparate collections, enabling related resources to be connected.
The presentation will conclude with lessons from developing the service and considerations for its future growth, including the importance of authority data in supporting entity reconciliation and enabling entity data to be shared with others.
The presentation will explore how diverse initiatives can complement one another to strengthen the Malagasy language in digital spaces. Key strategies include contributing linguistic data to Unicode and CLDR to enhance technical representation, participating in initiatives supported by organizations such as AFLC and SILICON at Stanford University, expanding open knowledge through Wikipedia and Wikidata, and improving language access through offline community initiatives such as Ainteny.
Rather than presenting language preservation as a single project, the session will show it as an evolving ecosystem in which technical standards, linked open data, open knowledge, media, technology, and community participation all play a role. The Malagasy experience illustrates how contributions at different levels from language data and digital infrastructure to structured knowledge, content creation, and cultural expression can work together to ensure that an underrepresented language remains visible, usable, and sustainable in the digital age.
As linked data increasingly moves from experimentation toward implementation and production, GLAMs face a practical dilemma: how do we build scalable workflows while also ensuring that this data represents the collections and communities we seek to describe? Archival collections especially make this challenge visible. Their records often contain historically underrepresented creators that are inconsistently described or absent altogether from catalogs and authority systems. Linked data is aptly poised to be a lever for richer and more inclusive information access.
This presentation shares a developing linked data production workflow at the University of New Mexico using OCLC Meridian to create, connect, and enrich entities from archival collections. Beginning with MARC records and archival finding aids, the workflow identifies candidates for entity work, gathers disparate pieces of evidence, connects existing authority data, and models relationships. Experiments with OpenRefine, APIs, and Python explore how entity identification and reconciliation can scale while preserving human review.
This case study will share lessons learned about where automation helps, where it breaks down, and how gaps in existing descriptive infrastructure shape who, what, and where can become visible through linked data. The project argues that sustainable linked data workflows should consider not only technical scalability, but representation: using metadata expertise and local knowledge to build richer connections and ensure that underrepresented creators are present in emerging knowledge systems.
Part of BIBFRAME’s promise is that bibliographic descriptions move between systems on the web. The Library of Congress (LC) and the Blue Core project have been using the Concise Bounded Description (CBD) as their unit of description for BIBFRAME data. However, there is no shared, machine checkable definition of what a valid one looks like. In this talk we will describe what LC’s CBD is, and how it came to be. After a brief overview of how the CBD is used at the Library of Congress and in the Blue Core project we will describe some of the challenges involved with moving CBDs around between systems. We will close with a discussion of the significance of ongoing work to validate BIBFRAME using DC Tabular Application Profiles, SHACL and JSON Schema.
The records of a single archival collection are inherently linked via a complex web of interrelationships between topics, people, places, and historical events. Current archival practices and metadata standards, however, do not easily facilitate the discovery of these relationships. In January 2025, Archivists at Dana Library on the campus of Rutgers University - Newark launched a pilot project utilizing Wikidata to make the complex data-sets about a jazz collection and a collection about an historic Rutgers-Newark student protest available to researchers. This presentation will explore how the archivists repurposed existing metadata to create new records in Wikidata, as well as provide an overview of the challenges, surprises, and successes.
The Art and Rare Materials BIBFRAME Extension (ARM), first published in 2018 as part of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Linked Data for Production (LD4P) project (2016-2018), is currently undergoing its second revision cycle. It has grown in scope to cover four distinct and interrelated domains; in its current form it seeks to extend the BIBFRAME ontology with additional classes and properties to describe Art, Rare Books, Archives, and Manuscripts. The current revision task force, under the joint auspices of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) and the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS), is now in the second year of its two-year work cycle. This presentation will provide an update on the work to date, with brief reports from each of the four subject domains as well as current considerations for the overall direction of the extension, technical upgrades, and integrated approaches to ontology development.
This presentation shares the experience of Cartonera Digital do Cariri, a university extension project at the Federal University of Cariri (UFCA), Brazil, that combines cartonera publishing, cultural memory, sustainability, accessibility, open access, and collaborative knowledge production. Inspired by the Latin American cartonera movement and the cultural traditions of the Cariri region, the project brings students, community participants, and external collaborators together to create physical and digital cultural resources using reused materials, digital publishing, podcasts, QR Codes, audio, and Brazilian Sign Language (Libras).
The presentation focuses particularly on the development of an Interactive Digital Library and its potential to evolve from a collection of community-generated publications into an interconnected cultural knowledge environment. It introduces a gradual Linked Data roadmap involving metadata development, identification of people, works, places, cultural traditions, institutions, and digital manifestations, followed by the use of shared vocabularies, persistent identifiers, machine-readable data, and connections to broader GLAM knowledge ecosystems.
Because the project is still under development, the presentation discusses partial results, challenges, and lessons learned rather than presenting a completed Linked Data implementation. The session highlights how small community-based projects can begin building the foundations for interoperable cultural heritage data while preserving local context, authorship, accessibility, and community participation. Full article : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UHH1g-DkVqXNF2QH4YSEm4SJWaDVZEJkY4CRkEsrEwo/edit?usp=sharing
