2025-07-23

2025-07-23

Date

Jul 23, 2025

Attendees

  • Melanie Cofield (facilitator)

  • Katie Pierce Meyer (notetaker)

  • Elliot Williams

  • Devon Murphy

  • Josh Conrad

  • Ella Thompson

  • Hannah Moutran

Recording

  • Zoom recording (link, includes chat)

Agenda

  • Housekeeping (review action items from last meeting, announcements)

  • Updates from the field

  • Continued discussion from last meeting

  • Analysis of Wikidata item changes - Josh Conrad

  • Wrap-up, action item review

Discussion topics & notes

Item

Who

Notes

Item

Who

Notes

Housekeeping

Melanie

Action items from last meeting:

Coordinate facilitator and notetaker for this meeting
Melanie reach out to Josh and Misu for planning July and August meetings
Misu shared info with Melanie that she can share with the group

Announcements:

Updates from the field

 

From our last meeting:

  • Library of Congress June 2025 BIBFRAME Update Forum Monday, June 30, 2025, 1:00 PM EDT - Recording link

    • any highlights/takeaways folks want to share?

    • Elliot attended, but nothing jumped out as key to share with the group

  • ALA Linked Data sessions (June 26-30) (Paloma attended, will report out in August meeting)

  • ELUNA conference session highlights

    • Benn Chang attended and his notes are below with links to info:

    • Linked Data and AI: Harnessing the power of both for transforming Library Services

      • Checkout knowledge graphs with AI and RAG pipeline 

      • Model Context Protocol (MCP AI Agents) bypass RAG pipelines. OpenAI, Langchain agents, Google Vertex AI 

      • 8 billion agents in a couple years according to IBM. ExL should create an agent registry / catalog for reference and validation. 

      • ExL will eventually explore LD or Knowledge Graphs in the AI Research Assistant (this feature is no longer in Beta, but UTL has not deployed it yet). 

      • ExL metadata assistant may involve LD and URI insertion. Ideally cataloging can become LD 

      • Recommended embedding strategies can feed LLM

    • Navigating Challenges and Embracing Opportunities: Advancing Linked Open Data Initiatives in Libraries

      • Bunch of initiatives, products and services and workflows we have to live with ExL, OCLC, LC/PCC, ShareVDE/LD4P, EBSCO (other vendors) 

      • Build a roadmap 3-5 years 

      • Introducing Bibframe records, no good argument yet for big institutions to move to. Folks don’t know the records exist or how to make use. 

      • Very few Proofs of Concept out there. No support from Admin for mythical metadata fantasy. Dean says to make it low priority. 

      • Who’s going to go first? What’s next? Lack of direction, values gained. 

      • All these URIs created by different institutions all pointing to same entity. 

      • Chicken and egg. 

      • Author card in Primo is step in right direction.

  • OCLC cataloging community meeting - Elliot attended, heard about effort to transform Dewey into linked data, for concepts

    • taking base numbers and using that as a conceptual category, giving those concepts a URI so that could be used for something other than books

      • Filling in gap in range of things where people are doing linked data

      • Higher level, broader conceptual

      • Public and school library communities as primary audience?

      • OCLC manages Dewey so that may be a factor

Continued discussion from last meeting

 

  • Primo Person cards/pages

    • response from Misu Kim at UT Dallas:

      • not as exhaustive or formal discussion as we have had at UTL

      • their library is more exploratory, and usually activate new features unless there's a compelling reason not to

      • as part of their library’s Primo group to review new features for activation, she recommended turning on the person/author cards

      • has not gotten positive or negative feedback yet, BUT one request to correct a name displayed in person info card

      • wants to see if there is usage data about clicks on person cards

        • current MixPanel data (new analytics for Primo that is part of the new Next Discovery Experience) shows users are clicking creator links more than subject, etc. - could person cards be a factor in that?

    • shared Irene’s report with UTL Discovery Services Advisory Group - well received, concerns resonated

      • UTL response - not ready for deployment, so many cards don’t have substantial information

    • Added to Ex Libris Idea Exchange for Primo: Melanie submitted!

  • Entity reconciliation for place names and venues

    • Ella shared Ransom Center efforts last month, nothing new to report this month, but happy to continue conversation in future

    • Devon has an update - UT has Spanish terms translation project with University of Florida and UC San Diego called PANA (Pan American Auhorities) - LoC source code, planning to work on an API to be able to reconcile terms to PANA, which will take time

      • recently met with UCLA and they shared terms, project called HAPI (recently lost NEH grant)

        • lots of crossover, so may be opportunity for merger or cross-citation!

    • May be good to continue conversation in future meeting!

  • Partnering with UTL Research Data Services on Linked Open Data efforts

    • Katie - geospatial datasets as foundational for us - done win collaboration with Michael Shensky

    • Some institutions have focused efforts on faculty publications - probably way to get institutional buy-in

Analysis of Wikidata item changes

Josh Conrad

Presentation, link: https://utexas.box.com/s/csbec4ehs0jx1illq37ivo08nrm4r8zx

  • Josh gave previous presentation in 2021 to this group: 2021-07-28

    • gave presentation at Digital Frontiers in 2021

    • modeling people, buildings, events

    • found Wikidata structure works for

    • gazetteer that has data extracted from several collections so far

    • have been working on project over time for years

    • now focused on getting all data ready for ArchivesSpace, which will hopefully facilitate getting additional or all collections represented in Wikidata

    • record of uploaded batches to Wikidata thus far - over 6900 records

    • 6009 have been edited, 903 unedited (this number of edits was unexpected)

    • Field edited the most: given name, likely because we included names in title, but didn’t always specify given name

    • Edits: lots of bot edits, lots adding translations of titles and descriptions, a lot adding IDs, some adding geographic data (parsing geodata into separate fields)

    • Manual superusers: Fralambert and Thierry Caro - both very active with heritage data throughout the world

    • Analysis: SPARQL query - March 2024 - all Wikidata items that have statements that cite AAA

      • Downloaded edit history from MediaWiki API

      • Want to rerun script and see what updates have been made over the last year

    • Virginia San Fratello - one of top records with changes

      • many IDs, including art and architecture specific as well as LoC, VIAF, etc.

    • So far, have not found edits that he finds problematic, they are all potentially valuable, BUT

      • Sex or gender - one statement that has been added, many times by bots based on names

        • HRC has legacy metadata about sex/genders as well as ethnicity and nationality of subjects of works - likely added without knowledge of the self identification of the subjects

        • Devon has best practices for trans/gender diverse resources guide - they can share!

          • long and short - not to record it and remove info if it was assumed without clear/obvious notation

        • Suggestion to request sex or gender property in Wikidata be split apart

    • Ella - have you found instances where you find records that exist but they are not structurally or conceptually what you are are wanting?

      • We definitely have instances where we see records for individual architects and related firms or a building / company that occupied the building being confused

      • It would be great to have some follow up discussions!

Wrap-up

 

Next meeting is August 27th

Action items

New:

add links to LD4 sessions:
add opportunities to discuss