Five new Discovery projects started this week. They are all focused on the creation and release of open metadata from libraries, museums and archives in line with the Discovery open metadata and technical principles.
The projects are:
- Bricolage – will publish catalogue metadata as Linked Open Data for two of its most significant collections: the Penguin Archive, a comprehensive collection of the publisher’s papers and books; and the Geology Museum, a 100,000 specimen collection housing many unique and irreplaceable resources. University of Bristol
- Open Education Metadata UK – will publish metadata sourced from four significant UK education collections as Open Data in a variety of formats, for anyone to reuse as linked data in their own applications. In addition, subsets of two collections which have high latent potential for linked data will be catalogued. Institute of Education
- Open Book – will release open metadata for the Fitzwilliam’s Designated Collection (over 150,000 records) and linked open data for the internationally important collection of illuminated manuscripts in the Fitzwilliam Museum (approximately 500 manuscripts records). The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge
- Music Collections at Cardiff University: Advancing the Resource – focuses on a collection of manuscript and printed music from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a resource of nearly 3000 items largely unknown to the wider scholarly community. This project will catalogue the material online, and make the data available through the Archives Hub and COPAC, as well as RISM (UK) (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales). Cardiff University
- Trenches to Triples – will provide Linked Data markup to 200 collection level descriptions and 6,000 item level catalogue entries relating to the First World War from the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives and will also provide a demonstrator for using Linked Data to make appropriate connections between image databases, Serving Soldier, and detailed catalogues. King’s College London
The projects are just getting started but will all have blogs which will record their progress. Look out for further information on the projects via the discovery site. All of the learning and outputs from these projects will be summarised on the Discovery website to ensure that others can benefit from what the projects learn and produce.
I have written an overview of all the current Discovery work on the JISC website.