OCLC’s Andrew Pace on “Linked Data in Libraries: From Disillusionment to Productivity”

From a NEXT Blog Post by Andrew Pace, Executive Director, Technical Research at OCLC:

What does “productive linked data” look like?
What could linked data cataloging mean for library workers and end users?

• Catalogers will trade re-work for pioneering new work, refocusing on materials and not on formatting strings, abandon local aggregation and cleanup of others’ data, and integrate “authority work” through more efficient “identity management.”
• Special collections staff will reveal hidden collections, gain methods for handing new or odd formats, encourage the participation of their communities of practice, and surface materials for community experts to enrich.
• Library administrators will free staff from aggregation, cleanup, and authority work; move knowledge work to the cloud; enable more experimentation; and embed the library more deeply in knowledge creation and sharing on their campuses and in their communities.
• End users will encounter context-enriched data, access language and script versatility, find their communities of practice, and discover new pathways of inquiry with an ability to answer questions they didn’t know to ask.

Read the Complete Blog Post by Andrew Pace
See Also: OCLC Research Releases Results of International Linked Data Survey for Implementers
See Also: Video: Lessons Learned from a Linked Data Prototype for Managing Bibliographic Data (OCLC Research “Works in Progress” Webinar)

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