Search results

This editorial underscores the importance of linked data and linked open data (LD/LOD) in contemporary librarianship and information science. It aims to present the motivation for this special issue of Library High Tech (LHT), specifically the theme of linking and opening vocabularies (LOV) as a component of the LOD landscape. The editorial also seeks to describe the content of the papers and their contributions in the areas of current practice, trends, and R&D (research and development).

The editorial is organized into four main sections: Introductory aspects about linking open data; the context and inspiration for this special issue of LHT; a description of the accepted papers highlighting their contribution for LOV; and a conclusion.

The editorial presents several reflective insights for advancing LOD and LOV practices that may lead toward a more integrated semantic web.

The editorial presents a synthesis of the three editors' views on approaching the subject of linking open vocabularies. The framework for the editorial is reflected in the original call for papers that supported this special issue.

This paper seeks to analyse the opportunities and potential risks for libraries applying for European support to fund projects regarding digitisation or availability of their already digitised content. The European Commission has a range of specific funding programs devoted to access, use and preservation of digital cultural heritage, so libraries and other “cultural institutions” holding European heritage are the natural applicants for this kind of calls. Sometimes, however, they do not know how to apply and fully understand the advantages and commitments involved. This paper aims to help libraries to understand European funding programs.

The paper has complementary experience with respect to applications and participation in EU‐funded projects, as well as the evaluation of proposals and the reviewing of approved projects. Apart from the lessons drawn from the personal experiences of the paper, the content is based on the most recent documentation and information about the Call For Proposals (CFP) made available by the European Commission.

Competition among proposals for European funding in the context of Digital Libraries (DLs) has grown considerably over the last few years. Therefore, it is essential for potential applicants to ensure the quality of their proposal by matching its content to the objectives of the Call and meeting the relevant evaluation criteria. In addition, the scope of the proposal needs to be embedded within the long‐term research and management strategy of the institutions applying to ensure both a successful application procedure and maximum sustainability of the project.

Apart from the documentation offered by the European Commission and several public reports of consultancy firms, no previous papers have been published which provide an insight into the workflow of the submission and evaluation of proposals for European funding in the domain of Digital Libraries.

The paper seeks to analyze the health of the vocabulary ecosystem in terms of requirements, addressing its various stakeholders such as maintainers of linked open vocabularies, linked data providers who use those vocabularies in their data and memory institutions which, it is hoped, will eventually provide for the long-term preservation of vocabularies.

This paper builds on requirements formulated more tersely in the DCMI generic namespace policy for RDF vocabularies. The examination of requirements for linked open vocabularies focuses primarily on property-and-class vocabularies in RDFS or OWL (sometimes called metadata element sets), with some consideration of SKOS concept schemes and Dublin Core application profiles. It also discusses lessons learned through two years of development of the linked open vocabularies (LOV), of which main features and key findings are described.

Key findings about the current practices of vocabulary managers regarding metadata, policy and versioning are presented, as well as how such practices can be improved to ensure better discoverability and usability of RDF vocabularies. The paper presents new ways to assess the links and dependencies between vocabularies. It also stresses the necessity and importance of a global governance of the ecosystem in which vocabulary managers, standard bodies, and memory institutions should engage.

The current paper is focused on requirements related to a single type of vocabulary but could and should be extended to other types such as thesauri, classifications, and other semantic assets.

Practical technical guidelines and social good practices are proposed for promotion in the Vocabulary Ecosystem (for example, by vocabulary managers).

This paper brings together the research and action of several important actors in the vocabulary management and governance field, and is intended to be the basis of a roadmap for action presented at the Dublin Core conference of September 2013 in Lisbon (DC 2013).

Linked data is gaining great interest in the cultural heritage domain as a new way for publishing, sharing and consuming data. The paper aims to provide a detailed method and MARiMbA a tool for publishing linked data out of library catalogues in the MARC 21 format, along with their application to the catalogue of the National Library of Spain in the datos.bne.es project.

First, the background of the case study is introduced. Second, the method and process of its application are described. Third, each of the activities and tasks are defined and a discussion of their application to the case study is provided.

The paper shows that the FRBR model can be applied to MARC 21 records following linked data best practices, librarians can successfully participate in the process of linked data generation following a systematic method, and data sources quality can be improved as a result of the process.

The paper proposes a detailed method for publishing and linking linked data from MARC 21 records, provides practical examples, and discusses the main issues found in the application to a real case. Also, it proposes the integration of a data curation activity and the participation of librarians in the linked data generation process.

This article aims to summarize the employers' requirements of scientific data specialists and the status quo of LIS education organizations' training system for scientific data specialists. It also focuses on the matching analysis between the course content and the responsibilities as well as requirements of scientific data specialists. Moreover, in order to provide some indications for LIS education of scientific data specialists in China, it presents the training objectives and modes.

Some job portals for librarians and the comprehensive job portals are investigated as information sources and the keywords such as “scientific data management”, “data service”, “data curation”, “e-Science”, “e-Research”, “data specialist” are selected to retrieval library-released job advertisements for scientific data specialists to understand the library's requirements towards scientific data specialists' core capabilities. Meanwhile the course catalogues of all iSchools' web sites are searched directly in order to find if scientific data courses are provided.

Libraries value teamwork ability, communication ability, interpersonal ability and a good use of data curation tools as the core competences for scientific data specialists. Candidates who possess a second advanced degree, who understand libraries, who hold demonstrated knowledge of metadata standards, and who emphasize details, under the same condition, are more likely to be considered first. Libraries do not have a unified title for scientific data specialists yet. The current curriculums of iSchools mainly cover research method, data science, data management and data service, data statistic and analysis, data warehouse, information studies and technologies, and so on.

This unique study explores some required qualifications of science data specialist surveyed by job openings, including the core skills, position requirements, responsibilities of the job, and some qualifications. It also investigates the related curriculum setting of iSchool universities through course descriptions. This study is very useful for curriculum development in Chinese LIS education of scientific data specialists including required core courses and selected electives, and to promote the practice of data service in Chinese academic libraries.

The paper aims to investigate issues surrounding publishing thesauri as linked data and explores a systematic way for publishing linked open thesauri

Based on the four principles of linked data, a novel approach is proposed to incorporate terminology services with thesauri and provide more descriptive information about thesauri and relating services. A proof-of-concept system was built for demonstrating the approach.

Carefully designed URIs and terminology services are necessary for publishing linked open thesauri. However, there is still a lack of standards for describing linked open thesauri and terminology services. Since it is possible to publish thesauri at the hands of creators and maintainers, distributed thesauri may be a good complement to the traditional registry approach.

Only a simple knowledge organisation system (SKOS) core model is considered in the paper. There may be some adjustment for applying the findings to thesauri using the SKOS extended model and other models.

The paper proposes a more systematic way for publishing linked open thesauri. It is important to consider a linked open thesaurus as a dynamic system rather than a static data dump. In addition, functionality for using thesauri is equally important for publishing thesauri.

This paper aims to provide details of a collaborative campus effort that created a Media Commons at an undergraduate library at a major research university to provide students and faculty opportunities to experiment with emerging technologies, with expanded opportunities to learn of best practices in educational technology.

This is a case study that used a web survey, focus groups, usage statistics, and interviews to determine the needs and best practices for creating and maintaining the Media Commons.

Preliminary results indicate that this program provides value to students and faculty seeking to learn about and use multimedia for coursework and projects. It confirms the gap on campus for places students can go for loanable technology and consultation services in the production and editing of multimedia.

Because the Media Commons just launched there has not had a programmatic evaluation yet to assess the impact of this program. However, based on initial feedback, suggestions for improvements in the program are included.

The rationale, process and efforts described in this paper can be replicated by other institutions that are interested in creating a Media Commons.

Although there are many articles written about Learning Commons and Information Commons, there is not much available that documents the efforts of creating a Media Commons at a library and the rationale for centralizing and freely making available campus multimedia expertise and equipment.

This paper seeks to analyze and evaluate different types of semantic web retrieval systems, with respect to their ability to manage and retrieve semantic documents.

The authors provide a brief overview of knowledge modeling and semantic retrieval systems in order to identify their major problems. They classify a set of characteristics to evaluate the management of semantic documents. For doing the same the authors select 12 retrieval systems classified according to these features. The evaluation methodology followed in this work is the one that has been used in the Desmet project for the evaluation of qualitative characteristics.

A review of the literature has shown deficiencies in the current state of the semantic web to cope with known problems. Additionally, the way semantic retrieval systems are implemented shows discrepancies in their implementation. The authors analyze the presence of a set of functionalities in different types of semantic retrieval systems and find a low degree of implementation of important specifications and in the criteria to evaluate them. The results of this evaluation indicate that, at the moment, the semantic web is characterized by a lack of usability that is derived by the problems related to the management of semantic documents.

This proposal shows a simple way to compare requirements of semantic retrieval systems based in DESMET methodology qualitatively. The functionalities chosen to test the methodology are based on the problems as well as relevant criteria discussed in the literature. This work provides functionalities to design semantic retrieval systems in different scenarios.

This paper aims to report on the design and development of a new approach for automatic classification and subject indexing of research documents in scientific digital libraries and repositories (DLR) according to library controlled vocabularies such as DDC and FAST.

The proposed concept matching-based approach (CMA) detects key Wikipedia concepts occurring in a document and searches the OPACs of conventional libraries via querying the WorldCat database to retrieve a set of MARC records which share one or more of the detected key concepts. Then the semantic similarity of each retrieved MARC record to the document is measured and, using an inference algorithm, the DDC classes and FAST subjects of those MARC records which have the highest similarity to the document are assigned to it.

The performance of the proposed method in terms of the accuracy of the DDC classes and FAST subjects automatically assigned to a set of research documents is evaluated using standard information retrieval measures of precision, recall, and F1. The authors demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach in terms of accuracy performance in comparison to a similar system currently deployed in a large scale scientific search engine.

The proposed approach enables the development of a new type of subject classification system for DLR, and addresses some of the problems similar systems suffer from, such as the problem of imbalanced training data encountered by machine learning-based systems, and the problem of word-sense ambiguity encountered by string matching-based systems.

The purpose of this paper is to discover how many of the authors' own university students own internet-enabled mobile devices and how they use them. That information will be incorporated into the design of a user-centered library mobile web site.

SurveyMonkey was used to create a web based survey which was distributed through a stable URL hosted on the Hunter College Libraries' web site.

This study illustrates that Hunter College students are increasingly using their mobile devices for educational purposes. Students are reliant on these devices even when other internet-enabled devices such as laptops and desktops are available.

The principal tool used, SurveyMonkey, did not enable high level restrictions on potential participants. As a result, multiple demographic questions were used to establish a respondent profile.

The findings of this study provide a framework for the creation of a mobile survey to discover users' habits and preferences. The data collected may also give an indication of what users may desire in a mobile library web site. Further investigation is needed to explore the relationship between commuting and how students use their mobile devices.

This is the only study which provides data on the devices urban college student library users own, and how they utilize these devices.