Designing a Linked Data Service across borders and timezones: the National Library Board’s experience

Abstract

This paper presents the implementation of a Linked Data Management System (LDMS) at the National Library Board Singapore (NLB), which aims to provide a unified view of bibliographic descriptions from diverse collections across the National Library, the Public Libraries, and the National Archives. The National Library Board worked with a vendor to convert metadata from multiple sources into entities in a triplestore for use in resource discovery. This paper will outline the challenges faced and lessons learnt in the production of Linked Data and improving data quality. The global pandemic forced the team to work remotely with an overseas vendor, which compounded the complexity of communicating relatively complex concepts and troubleshooting data issues. Great emphasis was placed on determining causes for data issues and correcting these. Challenges arose from the insertion of URIs into the source records to identify entities matching the string label as the reconciliation of entities extracted from different source systems is based on similarity of the name label and associated properties. The paper concludes with an outlook on the continuous refinement of data quality and the development of public interfaces to demonstrate the benefits of Linked Data to stakeholders. The development of this service inserts the discovery aspect directly into resources, demonstrating the potential of Linked Data to shape future services.