Infrastructure for heritage institutions – ARK PID’s

In the Digital Infrastructure program at the Library of the University of Amsterdam we have reached a first milestone. In my previous post in the Infrastructure for heritage institutions series, “Change of course“, I mentioned the coming implementation of ARK persistent identifiers for our collection objects. Since November 3, 2020, ARK PID’s are available for our university library Alma catalogue through the Primo user interface. Implementation of ARK PID’s for the other collection description systems […]

Infrastructure for heritage institutions – change of course

In July 2019 I published the first post about our planning to realise a “coherent and future proof digital infrastructure” for the Library of the University of Amsterdam. In February I reported on the first results. As frequently happens, since then the conditions have changed, and naturally we had to adapt the direction we are following to achieve our goals. In other words: a change of course, of course.  Projects  I will leave aside the […]

Infrastructure for heritage institutions – first results

In July 2019 I published the post Infrastructure for heritage institutions in which I described our planning to realise a “coherent and future proof digital infrastructure” for the Library of the University of Amsterdam. Time to look back: how far have we come? And time to look forward: what’s in store for the near future? Ongoing activities I mentioned three “currently ongoing activities”:  Monitoring and advising on infrastructural aspects of new projects Maintaining a structured dynamic overview […]

Infrastructure for heritage institutions

During my vacation I saw this tweet by LIBER about topics to address, as suggested by the participants of the LIBER 2019 conference in Dublin: It shows a word cloud (yes, a word cloud) containing a large number of terms. I list the ones I can read without zooming in (so the most suggested ones, I guess), more or less grouped thematically: Open scienceOpen dataOpen accessLicensingCopyrightsLinked open dataOpen educationCitizen science Scholarly communicationDigital humanities/DHDigital scholarshipResearch assessmentResearch […]

Ten years linked open data

This post is the English translation of my original article in Dutch, published in META (2016-3), the Flemish journal for information professionals. Ten years after the term “linked data” was introduced by Tim Berners-Lee it appears to be time to take stock of the impact of linked data for libraries and other heritage institutions in the past and in the future. I will do this from a personal historical perspective, as a library technology professional, […]

Library Linked Data Happening

On August 14 the IFLA 2014 Satellite Meeting ‘Linked Data in Libraries: Let’s make it happen!’ took place at the National Library of France in Paris. Rurik Greenall (who also wrote a very readable conference report) and I had the opportunity to present our paper ‘An unbroken chain: approaches to implementing Linked Open Data in libraries; comparing local, open-source, collaborative and commercial systems’. In this paper we do not go into reasons for libraries to […]

Roadmaps, roadblocks and data finding users

Lingering gold at ELAG 2014 Libraries tend to see themselves as intermediaries between information and the public, between creators and consumers of information. Looking back at the ELAG 2014 conference at the University of Bath however, I can’t get the image out of my head of libraries standing in the way between information and consumers. We’ve been talking about “inside out libraries”, “libraries everywhere”, “rethinking the library” and similar soundbites for some years now, but it […]