Making connections: Turning the Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection into a Linked Open Data set

Abstract

What does it mean to turn data into Linked Data? That is the question we are attempting to answer with this project. The IU Libraries released the metadata for the Cushman Photograph Collection under a CC-BY license as a CSV file and it is also available as an OAI-PMH harvestable feed in XML. But what would it take to make this metadata part of the Semantic Web and what does that mean for our digital collections moving forward? How might a collection like this available through the Semantic Web help researchers? This talk does not have all of the answers but we do have a story to share involving Cushman, OpenRefine, and RDF. Join us to learn what’s happened and how the IU Libraries will use this learning experience to shape our digital collections into the future.