Housekeeping | | Action items from last meeting: Announcements: Melanie is working on a scholarly article with Misu Kim (Assistant Director for Technical Services, Eugene McDermott Library, UT Dallas) and JJ Bennett (software developer at UT Libraries) on using Alma & Primo for digital collections discovery and access. Misu’s case study discusses linked data in Alma/Primo. Expected publication is Q2 2026, Journal of Digital Media Management. Reorganization at UT Libraries – Melanie’s team is now reporting to Dave Gilson (Head of Borrower and Access Services). Part of larger consolidation and reorganization at UT Libraries (see the UT Libraries org chart).
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Updates from the field | | TCDL Call for Proposals is open until February. DCMI 2025 conference Devon attended, and noted that there were lots of linked data presentations at the conference, particularly about Bibframe. Demos of Bluecore – Stanford developing tools for both catalog and digital collections. Take-away: scene is still hot for Bibframe and linked data. Devon’s notes are included in the UTL Metadata Steering Committee minutes.
Increasing number of library positions specifically focused on linked data: UC Davis is hiring a metadata librarian that is specifically focused on linked data and Bibframe. Xiaoli Li is at UC Davis, who leads the Ex Libris linked data community of practice. Dartmouth has also posted similar positions. UT Libraries has a new Automation and Integration Librarian position that is currently being recruited for. Hopefully that person might be engaged in this group, even though linked data isn’t explicitly mentioned in the responsibilities.
17th Semantic Web in Libraries Conference Nov 17-19 - FREE and online recordings now available ExLibris/Alma/Primo updates: January 11 2026 deadline to submit enhancement requests to be considered for the Alma and Primo 2026 enhancements voting cycle. With Melanie’s departure, this group might need to be more proactive in reaching out to Dave Gilson about linked data features in Alma/Primo. Melanie will talk about it with Dave, as well. Potentially invite Dave to an upcoming meeting of this group as an introduction.
Discussion around a question about the OCLC VIAF API being used by HRC in collection management system - apparently OCLC has changed the API authorizations, so they are not public any more? This was news to the rest of the group, as well. Possibly prompted by some kind of security concern? Big implications for the future of linked data, if systems we rely on aren’t stable or become closed. UTL has experienced vendor making unannounced changes to their APIs, including at least one that had a very significant negative impact. Pre-DCMI conference event hosted by Stanford was focused on the importance of metadata reuse and highlighted tools like DataCite as good examples of metadata providers who allow for open scraping and usage. Also their concept of having an open metadata policy at one’s library to use in contracts or across the institution to make it clear one’s metadata can be reused. It’s been talked about in the UTL metadata steering committee as something to consider implementing. OCLC was mentioned as a difficult partner in all of this – not always clear what is allowed with OCLC records. During the LD4P grant, PCC records that are hosted by OCLC were loaded into ShareVDE, but it wasn’t clear if that would continue in the future. From the OCLC developer network site: “VIAF data is available under the Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-BY). Please see OCLC Data licenses & attribution for guidelines.” When Anne Washington from OCLC came to talk to us about WorldCat Entities, she mentioned that the data was open, but to use the APIs (or use them at a certain level?) there was a product you have to pay for.
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Future planning | | Suggested theme: what does linked data work look like for each of us? Identify new co-facilitator/s Plan 2026 roadmap Frequency & day/time of meetings? Keep the frequency monthly, on the fourth week/month Change length to one hour, instead of hour and a half. The extended time has been a barrier for folks participating. But one hour has been too short in the past. So if we shorten the meetings, consider putting the peer learning section first, or being very strict about limiting the time for announcements, or encouraging people to share announcements/updates via email (in addition to in meetings).
Scheduling poll to determine best regular day and time for regular meetings – Paloma will send a poll soon, with the goal to get calendar invites soon before spring schedules fill up. Thursday afternoons and Wednesday afternoons are bad for Paloma and Katie Elliot will send Paloma what times are good for him, then Paloma can check what times look good generally for folks at UT
Discussion questions/recurring topics: Would a more broad DATA/DESCRIPTION focus (not exclusively LD/LOD-specific) serve our community-of-practice needs right now? (including LD, AI, data processing, etc.) Increasingly, it’s all about metadata management, enrichment, processing, and reuse But there is still a value in having a focus on linked data, since that isn’t a focus in other groups Consensus seemed to be to stay focused on linked data, but with a stated understanding that that includes related/adjacent topics & technologies. Are there current AI groups on campus? There were with the Libraries (an AI-focused group, an emerging technologies group, a group focused on AI tools in products/services), but those seem to no longer be active. There are campus (beyond the library) initiatives that might turn into potential opportunities for engagement.
BIBFRAME and Linked Data in Alma/Primo Entity reconciliation for place names and venues Partnering with UTL Research Data Services on Linked Open Data efforts Unique Resource Identifiers for Archival Resources Wikidata work Hanlin’s Wikidata research Project
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