NDF- 2017

In this presentation I will explore the problem of how to facilitate and open up new uses for aggregated cultural metadata using Linked Data as an organising principle. The National Libraries of New Zealand and Australia, through their respective metadata aggregation services Digital NZ and Trove, are aggregating significant metadata collections from cultural heritage institutions in the two countries, and republishing them through web APIs which provide a search interface across their entire data aggregation. However, the utility of the aggregated datasets and their APIs is limited by their particular focus on the catalogue items themselves, at the expense of the contextual entities which relate to those items: people, places, things, and ideas, which are treated as secondary. I am developing Oceania.digital, a cloud based service for re-publishing NZ and Australian cultural heritage data as Linked Open Data. In this presentation I will use Oceania.digital to show how repackaging the aggregated metadata as Linked Data can facilitate reuse by web developers and end users, and enable new methods and approaches to online engagement with the dataset. Crucially, these new approaches allow the data to be interrogated from different perspectives, and to be richly interlinked with data and narratives from other sources, as part of the growing global web of Linked Open Data. This presentation will be of interest to collection managers and technologists in GLAMS, as well as humanities researchers and cultural creators seeking new kinds of access to collections data.