Lower the Barrier & Be Empowered: Creating and Including Linked Data Vocabularies for Digital Collections

Linked data has been explored and adopted by the library and archive community in recent years, but it has remained a relatively high bar to implement for most librarians and catalogers in their daily work. To lower the barrier, the librarians at the University of Central Florida (UCF) Libraries have adopted open source tools and platforms such as OpenRefine and Wikidata to their workflows to include linked data for their collections in the digital repositories as well as the library catalog. This presentation will review digital repositories\u27 capabilities in accommodating linked data and show several cases of adding linked data vocabularies, such as those from the Library of Congress\u27 authority files and the Virtual International Authority File, to the UCF Libraries\u27 digital collections. The added linked data are meant to enhance the collections by enriching contexts to various entities or fields such as individual and corporate authors, thesis advisors, contributors and subjects. OpenRefine is used in this process to edit data and reconcile data against external vocabularies. In the case of no standard vocabulary is found, Wikidata is used to create linked data for local terms so that they can be added to the digital collections and shared with the larger community. This presentation will also address highlights and challenges of working with linked data, such as distinguishing between various terms, searching for sufficient information in establishing terms and presenting them in meaningful ways