Increase discoverability through crowdsourcing and linked open data

Carnegie Hall Archives

Written by KathleenS on Tue, 02/16/2016 – 13:58

We in the Archives department at Carnegie Hall are often working with complex materials in our collections that do not  fit typical cataloging or metadata schemas.  Like many organizations, we have thousands of digitized assets that need to be transcribed and tagged so they can become discoverable and searchable.  Once this happens we can begin to unlock all the different ways the information can be used, especially using linked open data.

We’re interested in exploring strategies and tools that could help add RDF (linked open data) layer to crowdsourced metadata for things like entities, subjects, geographical locations, etc. For example, associating entity tags with URIs from established authority sources such as the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) could aid in disambiguation. At another, simpler level, semantic markup such as microdata (RDFa, schema.org) can make metadata like dates more meaningful and discoverable in a machine-readable environment.

A METRO Fellow would be able to help establish a strategic approach to collect metadata through crowdsourcing that is structured in a way that allows us to quickly and efficiently create linked open data. We expect many other organizations would be interested (and benefit) from this proposed framework.

See our draft diagram of this proposed process.