2021 LD4 Conference on Linked Data

Wikidata In The Classroom, Stacy Allison-Cassin, Adam Cavanaugh, Cora Coady and Julia Gilmore
Wikidata is a low-barrier platform that offers libraries and other cultural heritage institutions mechanisms for amplifying the impact of collections and research data. However, Wikidata can also serve as an effective tool for teaching concepts and skills related to description, metadata, and Linked Data. Further, pedagogical projects using Wikidata are “non-disposable assignments” and follow a strategy focused on creating learning materials that have a life after the end of a course. This session will outline a scaffolded project used in the context of a Masters level LIS course on documenting the cultural record. The panel session will be a guided discussion between the course instructor in collaboration with three students. The session will cover linked data assignment design, student experiences, and reflections on what worked and what didn’t.

Creating Linked Data from Books and Magazines, Dan C. Baciu
Printed books and magazines come without hyperlinks, but much of the textual content stored in books from any period of time and publicized in any format can be enhanced to contain hyperlinks. Over the last five years, Dan C. Baciu has worked with his students and collaborators at TU Delft, UC Santa Barbara, Illinois Tech, and HathiTrust Research Center to do this. The benefits of this approach go beyond the inclusion of any imaginable piece of text into larger collections of linked data. Baciu et al. also designed digital tools to comprehensively map textual data and analyse the textual content for historical information from different periods of time. These new methods for mapping and historical analysis are published in the annex of the presenter's peer-reviewed article "Cultural Life" (Biosystems 104208). In this presentation, he will speak about the potential impact that the newly created possibilities and their further development will have on libraries. Project page with presentation slides at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/J84AE

Developing a Syllabus for Linked Data Education in Nigerian Library & Information Science (LIS) Schools, Victoria Sokari and Zainab Haliru
Opportunities abound for different types of data and documents to be shared within a continuum of space and time as a result of linked data. Succinctly put, linked data occurs when the web is used to create connections between data occurring in different formats that are stored and maintained in various databases by different organizations and distributed across different geographic locations. The benefits accruable to the library from linked data appear immense. It has therefore, become urgent that library schools in Nigeria begin to consider linked data as a topic that is worthy of being incorporated into the syllabi of cataloging and metadata courses. It is against this background that this study, “Developing a Syllabus for Linked Data Education in Nigerian Library & Information Science (LIS) Schools," will be conducted in order to examine what topics cataloging educators and practitioners in Nigeria consider to be necessary for inclusion in syllabi for linked data education. The study particularly explored the following aspects: course content, educator competence, instructional aids, materials, and infrastructure.