Linked data and URIs #1-- What are They?

This is the first in a series of seven weekly blog posts written by Zahra Gordon which will explain “Linked Data,” an emerging topic in the library field, and how it relates to “Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs),” which are appearing in the subfields of MARC records with increasing frequency.

 There’s been a lot of talk in the library community (especially the library cataloging community) lately about “linked data.” Linked data is “a set of best practices for publishing structured data on the Web” (https://www.w3.org/wiki/LinkedData). Simply put, linked data uses links to structure information in a way that makes it more readable by computers.

Why is this important to libraries? The idea is that using links to make library data more readable by computers will make it findable by automated tools outside of the library catalog and connect it to other sources of information outside of the catalog. So, people searching outside of the catalog can find our resources more easily, and we can more easily find further information about our resources that’s located elsewhere.

In catalog records, these links take the form of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), defined as “unique sequences of characters that identify abstract or physical resources” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier). The Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) that we’ve added to our records for years (often in subfield $u of MARC field 856) are a type of URI.

URIs are increasingly being added to fields and subfields in MARC records and are just a preliminary step in turning library data into linked data. Eventually, the idea is that MARC will be replaced by tools and models such as BIBFRAME that allow library data to be entirely created and edited according to linked data principles.

The next post will discuss where these URIs show up in MARC records and what they mean.

Zahra Gordon is the Cataloger at the New Hampshire State Library. Before coming to the State Library, she worked as a cataloger for a contract cataloging agency serving government libraries in the Washington Metropolitan Area and then for YBP Library Services (now GOBI Library Solutions) in Contoocook, New Hampshire.