GLAM (Libraries, Archives, Museums) Technical Meetup #1 : Linking Data

rIt is very important for heritage institutions to link their metadata to external entities (like wikidata). It offers a better visibility and permits new usages. In this event, we will share experiences in this topic.

At the beginning there will be three 15' talks :
🎤 The experience of linked swissbib's ID Hub. Jonas Waeber, Basel University Library
🎤 Metagrid enhancer endpoint. @tobinski, Metagrid
🎤 How can we improve the discoverability of our Primo VE resources through Linked Data? Bernd Uttenweiler, Zürich ETH Library

Then it will be open for discussion 🗣️ on the topic with a small apero 🥂🍪

There will be also the possibility for participants to suggest topics, bring ideas and shape the next meetups of this group.

Main language of the event, will be used in the talks : English
Other languages : Participants can speak German or French if they would like to

Please register if you would like to participate, so that we know how many people we should expect.

Sponsor of this first meetup : arbim IT

ID Hub
The ID Hub links and enriches bibliographic metadata with
information stemming from external knowledge bases. As a part of
linked swissbib, a project aiming to convert the bibliographic metadata found in Swissbib into a RDF representation, its main goal has been to expand the normally rather sparse information about persons and organisations with richer biographical and contextual information found in Wikidata, DBPedia, VIAF and GND. The workflow consists of two steps:

1. Downloading, filtering, normalising and storing the external data sets on a regular basis.
2. Matching data from Swissbib by the respective external identifier and
possibly enriching the data ad hoc.

The infrastructure has been built with extensibility in mind, but
unfortunately, with the termination of Swissbib, the work came to a premature end. However, due to its modular approach and its use of rather powerful tools (Apache Kafka and Elasticsearch), the ID Hub could very well be the starting point of more generalised approaches to linking data.

How can we improve the discoverability of our Primo VE resources through Linked Data?

The Primo VE Index of the ETH-Bibliothek contains, among other things, metadata on historical materials from the collections and archives of ETH Zurich.

To help researchers find and contextualize these holdings more easily, we looked for ways to link our resources to other data and systems.
First, we created person cards if there was a GND ID for an author.
Later, we created person pages and place pages, which are more linkable and can be used more often.
In a third (experimental) step, we extended the Primo search results list to provide a list of persons and places that match the search term.
To make our data linkable as well we offer an API and different endpoints.

Metagrid
Metagrid is a project of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (SAGW), realized by the the Diplomatic Documents of Switzerland (Dodis). It allows to set up, manage and analyze links between identical person entities from about 30 projects.

We are currently working on a new enhancer endpoint that will provide our project partners with additional data retrieval possibilities. For example, partners should be able to query data from Metagrid, combine it with other data providers such as Wikidata or GND, and map identifiers. All this should be accessible via a simple API.

In the presentation, will provide insights into the state of the current developments, address the challenges in the context of the API (e.g. scalability) and present possible use cases.