open data

Infrastructure for heritage institutions – Open and Linked Data

Lukas KosterData, Infrastructure, Library

In my June 2020 post in this series, “Infrastructure for heritage institutions – change of course  ” , I said: “The results of both Data Licences and the Data Quality projects (Object PID’s, Controlled Vocabularies, Metadata Set) will go into the new Data Publication project, which will be undertaken in the second half of 2020. This project is aimed at publishing our collection data as open and linked data in various formats via various channels. A […]

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Maps, dictionaries and guidebooks

Lukas KosterData

Interoperability in heterogeneous library data landscapes Libraries have to deal with a highly opaque landscape of heterogeneous data sources, data types, data formats, data flows, data transformations and data redundancies, which I have earlier characterized as a “data maze”. The level and magnitude of this opacity and heterogeneity varies with the amount of content types and the number of services that the library is responsible for. Academic and national libraries are possibly dealing with more […]

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Library Linked Data Happening

Lukas KosterLibrary

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 […]

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Roadmaps, roadblocks and data finding users

Lukas KosterLibrary

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 […]

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The poor person’s linked open data workbench

Lukas KosterData

Using discovery tools for presenting integrated information There has been a lot of discussion in recent years about library discovery tools. Basically, a library discovery tool provides a centrally maintained shared scholarly material metadata index, a system for searching and an option for adding a local metadata index. Academic libraries use it for providing a unified access platform to subscribed and open access databases and ejournals as well as their own local print and digital […]

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Do we need mobile library services? Not really

Lukas KosterLibrary

Mobile services have to fulfill information needs here and now Like many other libraries, the Library of the University of Amsterdam released a mobile web app this year. For background information about why and how we did it, have a look at the slideshow my colleague Roxana Popistasu and I gave at the IGeLU 2010 conference.For now I want to have a closer look at the actual reception and use of our mobile library services […]

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