Book Review: Linked Data for Cultural Heritage (An ALCTS Monograph)

Abstract

While linked data has been on the horizon for librarians, archivists, and other curators of cultural memory nearly since it was first expounded fifteen years ago, for many it has remained an abstraction.¹ Jones and Seikel present six contributions by those engaged in implementing linked data projects across the cultural heritage landscape, seeking to bridge the gap between the idea of linked data and concrete applications that can be adopted at a local level. The focus is not on the technology of linked data, though each of the chapters discuss some technical issues relevant to the projects, but rather on how the technology can overcome the limits of earlier cultural metadata encoding systems (e.g., MARC) and what new challenges and opportunities it presents. By presenting studies of real-world implementations of linked data, this volume effectively communicates the progress made and a sense of what the technology could do for a local collection.