Our linked data strategy needs to be tied to the overall strategy of the library. The library’s current strategic plan, and the strategic teams chartered under it, have goals that can be met by linked data initiatives. Some of these goals include
- Opening Penn scholarship to new constituencies via new partnerships, improved workflows, and expanded interfaces. As noted in the previous section, we have done some preliminary work on this in linked data by creating entities for Penn scholars, centers, and departments in Wikidata. These can be linked to the growing corpus of information on scholarly publications in Wikidata, making them more discoverable. If that linked data is further extended with links to copies of publications by Penn scholars in our repositories, it also makes them more widely accessible.
- Enhancing and expanding our digital scholarship support has included initiatives like the Collections as Data subteam of the Center for Research Data and Digital Scholarship. That team as considered using the data mining Platform for Open Data (POD) records that have linked data subject references. The data are available from a web API (Annif) running in a Docker container.
As the Penn Libraries prepare for a new round of strategic planning in the coming year, we will further evolve our linked data strategies to ensure that they support and fulfill the strategic goals we adopt for the coming strategic plan period.
