Towards a semantic approach in GLAM Labs: The case of the Data Foundry at the National Library of Scotland

Abstract

GLAM organisations have been exploring the benefits of publishing their digital collections in a wide variety of forms since the 2000s. Many institutions, and in particular libraries, have applied the Semantic Web and Linked Data to their main catalogues. Recent advances in technology and innovative approaches concerning the reuse of the digital collections by means of computational access have paved the way for the creation of laboratories within GLAM organisations. In this work, we present a framework that works in several steps to transform into linked open data (LOD), assess and enrich with external repositories the data sets made available by GLAM organisations under open licences. The framework has been applied to three metadata data sets made available by the Data Foundry at the National Library of Scotland obtaining as a result a collection of LOD repositories, a data quality assessment and examples of exploration. The results of this work are publicly available and can be applied to other domains such as digital humanities and data science.