Tag Archives: Drupal

Improving Linked Data

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Diagram of mine workings in book VI, "Machines for Drawing Heavy Vapours off from Tunnels"

Diagram of mine workings in book VI, “Machines for Drawing Heavy Vapours off from Tunnels”

In an earlier post in December 2011, we announced the release of the Taxonomic Literature II (TL-2) search tool that allows anyone to search and read its fifteen volumes.  One of the things we mentioned in that post was our plans to open the TL-2 dataset to searchability and reuse by providing it as Linked Open Data (LOD).

This time, we’ll discuss details of our plans for Linked Open Data, some of the data we are extracting, and the challenges in creating data for a linked open data set.

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Bringing Books* to the Web

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Books on a shelf in the Smithsonian Libraries

The past couple of months in the web-development world have been spent building a foundation for a method of presenting digitized book-like things on the Smithsonian Libraries website. This has been an interesting time creating a home for the history, art, and culture part of our scanned collections.

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Notes from the LITA National Forum: Linked Open Data

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LITA Forum Image

On September 30, two of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries' staff attended the American Library Association's LITA (Library and Information Technology) National Forum. The three-day conference was titled "Rivers of Data, Currents of Change". Although it was not explicitly defined, there was a common thread of conversation surrounding Linked Open Data throughout the conference.

For this reason, the presentation given by the Smithsonian Libraries' digial projects librarian Keri Thompson and lead developer Joel Richard, along with Trish Rose-Sandler of the Missouri Botanical Garden, was well-received. Titled "Building the New Open Linked Library: Theory and Practice," the talk gave a high-level overview of the redesign of the Libraries' website, a brief summary of Linked Data, how the Libraries' website redesign centers around the concept of Linked Open Data, and some of the unique things that happen when open data is made available on the web, specifically with the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL).

Keri Thompson gave a summary of where our website is today and a very concise overview of the types of content we have. She also gave a brief introduction to Linked Open Data to help get the audience up to speed, since only about half were familiar with the concept.

Joel Richard talked about implementing Linked Data in Drupal 7 and one in-depth example of the data we are planning to put online. The data set provided Taxonomic Literature 2 (or TL-2) is a database of botanists, their publications and detailed information about their contributions to botany and is being digitized by the Libraries'. He also discussed how we are mapping the TL-2 data to the Linked Open Data model, and challenges that we foresee in this development.

Trish Rose-Sandler discussed and presented examples of the new and unique types of things that people can do when we make our data available on the web. These included repurposing BHL content as well as new visualizations of data that were impossible before BHL. 

Overall, the presentation was well-attended with between 50 and 60 people in the audience and a number of good questions posed after the presentation and in subsequent days at the conference. Fortunately the Libraries' talk occurred early in the conference and it was good to see that Drupal and Linked Data were mentioned in a number of talks throughout the conference, including the closing keynote presentation by Barbara McGlamery, a Taxonomist at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. The Libraries' staff plan to attend the 2012 LITA National Forum in Columbus, OH to follow-up on our experiences as we build the Digital Library in the upcoming months.

View the Powerpoint slides of the presentation from the ALA Connect Site.

 

Code4Lib 2011 Conference in Bloomington, IN

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On February 7-10, Smithsonian Libraries web developer Joel Richard attended the Code4Lib conference held at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN. Sub-freezing weather aside, the conference was a hotbed of software developers, metadata experts and computer people getting together to discuss their latest work in developing software, websites, tools and technologies that support the mission of libraries across the country and the world!

Attended by 270 people, the conference is loosely organized into 20-minute presentations held every day on a variety of topics, voted on by the Code4Lib community, a dozen daily 5-minute "lightning talks" delivered at a rapid pace, and more in-depth breakout sessions held once a day. The conferences also offers attendees, especially #c4l11 Code4Lib 2011 on Twitpicthose who are new, a chance to get their feet wet at a "newcomers' dinner" hosted by a veteran (one of which was organized by Joel.)

The attendees to the conference ranged from leaders in the computers+library world (i.e. Diane Hillmann, the keynote speaker, Karen Coombs of OCLC, and Naomi Dushay of Stanford University Libraries) to catalogers and IT people working at small and large libraries and institutions around the country. Some attendees help in producing open-source products and come to the conference to present and share knowledge. Others attend to "sip from the fire hose" of information and to meet and connect with their fellow library IT and computer professionals.

The high points of the conference that have most immediate use to the Libraries are the variety of ways that Drupal is being used to develop (or re-develop) library websites and mobile-based library web applications and development of Digital Libraries using open-source tools and technologies. The knowledge gleaned from these presentations will be put to use in future development efforts at the Libraries.

When it comes to the types of mobile applications, many libraries are turning to web-based applications (or WebApps) to do their development. This helps insulate them from the increasing variety of platforms on which to program real applications (iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc) and instead use more familiar languages for development (HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc). Those presenting mobile applications were Josh Bishnoff of the University of Illinois, Jason Casden and Joyce Chapman of NCSU Libraries, Esme Cowles of UCSD, Cory Lown also of NCSU Libraries, and Shian Chang of Georgetown University. 

Drupal was discussed a fair bit at the conference, possibly due to the presence and friendly evangelism of Cary Gordon, a board member of the Drupal Association. He gave a great presentation on using Drupal 7 as a Rapid Application Tool for web development. Mentioned earlier Shian Chang described in a lightning talk how her group used Drupal to build their mobile library website. In one of the breakout sessions, Drupal's history and future were discussed with a group of 15 or so developers, some of which were already using Drupal and others who were just getting started or were considering it.

The most interesting Drupal-related talk was actually given at one of the pre-conference sessions that took place on Monday before the full conference started. A good 20-25 people discussed the Islandora project, which is a merging of the Fedora repository and the Drupal content management system. Islandora extends and replaces some functionality of Drupal to make it a powerful and flexible tool for developing your repository and associated website.

The Indiana University Library was the host for this year's Code4Lib and they did a remarkable job, most importantly with the live streaming of the conference for those who were unable to attend in person. The video archive of the conference can be found: here