Mellon Awards $1.5 Collaborative Grant to Six Libraries For Linked Open Data Development Initiatives

From Stanford University Libraries:

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Stanford a $1.5 million grant [over two years]  to support library initiatives that develop and advance the use of linked open data. Stanford Libraries will coordinate a team representing Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Library of Congress and Princeton to upgrade the current infrastructure libraries use to create, store, and share bibliographic data.
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The grant team will be developing a new, distributed model based on web architecture that, according to Phillip Schreur, Assistant University Librarian for Technical and Access Services at Stanford, “will fundamentally change how libraries interact with the semantic web.”

According to Schreur, much information is either unavailable or unintelligible to the semantic web, including large amounts from libraries.  “Much of a library’s data has been locked in historic formats that do not allow for it to be connected to the Web,” said Schreur.  “Linked Data uses basic web standards to publish data so it can be interlinked and become discoverable on the Web.”

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Efforts to improve the current system have been underway for some time, with individual libraries each investigating new approaches; this project allows for such developments to converge synergistically.  Stanford will drive the effort, developing the communal environment within which institutions can interact and providing the social construct for continual engagement and exchange of ideas.

Together, the six partners will explore new approaches to integrating research, from art works to historic films, hip hop to globes, from musical performances to philosopher’s annotations.

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Stanford is also a partner in a companion project based at Cornell University (Linked Data for Libraries-Labs) that seeks to develop new linked-data-based tools and methods to better describe libraries’ scholarly information resources. Although a separately funded project, the two will work in tandem to mutually advance each other’s goals.

Read the Complete Announcement

Note: Stanford just publicly announced grant. It was officially awarded on March 10, 2016.

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