CONTENTdm Linked Data Pilot

CONTENTdm is a service for building, preserving and showcasing a library’s unique digital collections.

The large volume of unique, digital content stored in CONTENTdm offers an excellent opportunity for transition to linked data. Using linked data, the wide variety of data models and descriptive practices across CONTENTdm will be significantly easier to manage for library staff and will provide rich discovery for library end-users and web browsers. Immediate benefits of this project will be the ability to do structured searching across all CONTENTdm repositories and searching and faceting based on authority files and library-staff-defined vocabularies. The outcomes and findings from the linked data Wikibase prototype (Project Passage) completed in 2018 have provided great insight into how to implement a system to facilitate the mapping, reconciliation, storage, and retrieval of structured data for unique digital materials.