Meeting Notes, ALA (Soon-to-be) LITA/ALCTS Interest Group on Linked Library Data

San Diego, January, 2011

Approximately 50 people attended this Interest Group Interest session. The meeting opened with introductions from Karen on a few formalized efforts related to LLD, and open bibliographic data in general. These updates focused on the work of:

• The Open Knowledge Foundation Network , its Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data , and their recently announced "Open Bibliographic Data Challenge" , which is a first attempt at asking what we can do with this data once it is published;
• The W3C Linked Library Data Incubator Group, which will be publishing a report in the first half of 2011; and
• The JISC "Linked Data Horizon Scan" published last year.

This was the first meeting of the group as potentially an official ALA group, so most of the discussion was around: what do we want to do as a group? We created two lists:

• Needs this group might be able to meet
• Gaps we recognize, but which might be beyond our scope

Needs this group might be able to meet

• Training for librarians and library staff
• Demonstration projects that can help people learn
• General demo environment, and linked library data sandboxes.
• Use cases for libraries and library user-contributed data
• Use cases for non-libraries that could use library data
• Examples of sharing with other organizations
• A CAT/CODE collaboration -- catalogers and coders working together (possibly a meeting or workshop to begin with)
• Clearly identify problems that could be solved with linked data (not just LD for the sake of LD)
• Focus on unique materials, such as digital archives. These are a good test of LD and provide a variety of metadata formats to test with.
• Think about resources, esp. people resources
• Small demo project: creating a button like the "Like" button on Facebook (Note: after some discussion about using library catalogs for "social bibliography" functions, the group mainly agreed that it would be best to integrate library data into existing social sites rather than try [and fail] to make the library catalog a social site.)
• Create an RDF vocabulary for OPAC events (circulation, hold, return, view)
• Make use of existing technologies like Twitter, RSS, OAI, to disseminate LD
• "Data speed dating" -- an event with people with data to offer meet and see if they can meet others with data that links to theirs
• The social nature of this data, and the need to describe people. One attendee mentioned Harvard Law's "ShelfLife" as a possible place to look for movement in this area (though not Linked Data, and not Open)
Breaking large linked data (and other projects) into more manageable, specific, chunks to support outreach (ex of Vivo)

Gaps

• No killer APP for the semantic web -- nothing analogous to the MOSAIC browser that made the WWW accessible to all.
• Lack of tools for data creation, conversion
• Lack of tools for linking of LD (easily)
• Need for open data, and for a community shift to emphasis on services rather than data as source of revenue
• Tools and methods that are accessible to organizations that struggle to afford current library technology solutions

The closing discussion was about the role of the Interest Group. Whether we should be doing programs or sticking with informal conversations for the time being. The consensus was for the latter. There was also mention of at least one Linked Data program already being planned for ALA Annual in New Orleans, with Eric Hellmann and Ross Singer presenting.