British Library
Case study : The British Library
The British Library turned to Talis to provide Linked Data expertise and Talis Platform Managed Hosting
At a glance:
- Talis Consulting helps the British Library Publish the BNB
- Talis provide awareness raising sessions for the British Library
- The British Library and Talis change the way bibliographic data is modelled
- British Library data hosted and served by the Talis Platform Managed Services
When the British Library wanted to explore ways in which they could make the British National Bibliography available to a wider audience, they chose to mix traditional library know-how with cutting edge Semantic Web technologies, and turned to Talis to provide the requisite Linked Data expertise.
Widening access to the world’s knowledge
The British National Bibliography (BNB) records the publishing activity of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland and as such is a measure of their intellectual output. This has traditionally included printed publications and more recently has been extended to electronic publications following the extension of legal deposit to this class of material in 2003.
The British Library’s strategic vision is to ‘provide both physical and digital access to world-class information where and when people need it’. While the British Library already makes the BNB available via traditional channels, specialist knowledge is required to re-use the data effectively. As a part of its open metadata strategy, The British Library wanted to explore ways in which they could make this BNB available to a wider, and potentially non-library, audience. The Library already knew it wanted to publish the dataset as Linked Data and had already provided some samples to the library community for review. The challenge faced by Neil Wilson, Head of Metadata Services, was to both introduce Linked Data to the team that would be creating the new dataset, and allow them to get to grips with new ways of thinking about their legacy data encoded as library standard Machine Readable Catalogue Record (MARC) records.
Understanding new technologies
“It’s been valuable to work with one of the few organisations that already has a track record in this rapidly developing area while also having the experience to understand library metadata at a detailed level.”
Neil Wilson
Head of Metadata Services
British Library
With their rich heritage in libraries and their strong commitment to building Semantic Web technologies, Talis Consultancy were the natural choice to move the project forward.
Richard Wallis and Tim Hodson started by introducing Linked Data Semantic Web approaches in a series of awareness raising sessions describing how their principles might be applied by The British Library. This allowed Neil to bring together the teams who would work on the supply and conversion of data, and increase their understanding of the many benefits inherent in a Linked Data approach to publishing data on the web.
The benefits of a Linked Data approach for the British Library include: providing increased flexibility to describe their resources; to link to new external sources of information; to enable users to make new connections via their data; to facilitate easier selective re-use of their data, without the need for large file downloads; to allow data converted in the future to blend easily with older work without costly and complex database merging and to provide more flexible access for developers wanting to incorporate British Library metadata in their applications.
The next stage was to immerse key staff responsible for converting the BNB in a two day course which provided the opportunity to explore Linked Data concepts in more detail. The course took participants through the process of re-modelling data, converting the data to match the model, and then publishing and reusing the result as Linked Data.
Neil found the training to be “useful in helping to expand the horizons of the teams involved, in developing an improved understanding of the new possibilities the technology offers and in creating fresh perspectives on traditional library metadata”
Modelling bibliographic data in a new way
With the groundwork laid, it was time for the British Library team to get to grips with how their traditional MARC records would look as Linked Data. Tim Hodson supported the Metadata Services team as they worked through the nuances and semantics of describing traditional bibliographic metadata as Linked Data. Tim helped the team move from thinking about describing the record, to describing the things the record is about. This fundamental difference between a table centric and entity centric way of looking at data is a key concept of Linked Data.
An essential success factor in any data modelling process is the extent to which domain expertise of the metadata provider is captured and integrated into the resultant model. The combination of British Library bibliographic expertise and Talis’ data modelling guidance means this model is potentially suitable for experimentation by other organisations using similar metadata and could even be extended by others describing bibliographic resources in different contexts. An example might be the modelling of the publication of a book as an ‘event’. There are other events in the life of a bibliographic resource that could be modelled in a similar way. The bibliographic model and linked BNB dataset should help to advance the discussion among those interested in new ways of publishing bibliographic descriptions to the web of data.
“A turnkey solution removes the requirement to develop and resource new system administration activity and allows us to concentrate our efforts on remodelling the metadata to provide a better result.”
Neil Wilson
Head of Metadata Services
British Library
Publishing using Talis Platform Managed Services
Like most other organisations, The British Library does not currently have in house resources to host a large Linked Data dataset. The Talis Platform Managed Service provides the British Library with access to a scaleable hosted data publishing solution. Neil wanted the benefits of a robust hosting platform without the overhead of an additional technical support requirement.
Where next?
The BNB is just one dataset that the British Library would like to expose as Linked Data. By their willingness to adopt cutting edge technologies, and working with world renowned Linked Data experts such as Talis, the British Library continues to be seen as an international leader in the field of bibliographic best practice.
Neil also hopes that “our work with Talis proves beneficial to the wider library and linked data communities and encourages other organisations to experiment, and to open up and share their data in similar ways.”
Update:
The British Library have now published metadata for 2.6 million resources, 60 years worth of books, as Linked Data. For an overview of the dataset, and to find out more, visit http://bnb.data.bl.uk. To find out more about the data model being used, read our overview.
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Talis Consulting are a team of expert Consultants who have experience in delivering Linked Data projects; this is imperative when working to help navigate the intricacies and nuances of implementing a successful Linked Data project, without this expertise we aren't able to work to ensure your success.
In support of the Consulting services, Talis also provides a service enabling the hosting of Linked Data, utilising the features of the Talis Platform as a Software as a service solution.
If you would like to start your Linked Data adoption, please contact us.
