eResearch Analyst Ingrid Mason won the VALA 2014 Travel Scholarship to learn more about international linked open data practices.
Intersect is pleased to announce that one of its eResearch Analysts, Ingrid Mason, was the recipient of the VALA 2014 Travel Scholarship. Ingrid has a background in digital cultural heritage (digital collection and preservation), enabling discovery and interoperability across galleries, libraries, archives and museums (the GLAM sector) and providing eResearch support services for humanities, arts, and social sciences including research data management and software development. Ingrid sought out the VALA scholarship to secure funding to travel overseas to learn more about linked open data practices as professional development.
Linked open data as an approach to structuring data is an intersection of expertise and skills found in the data-information-computer sciences. Ingrid’s whistle stop research tour started in San Francisco at the Internet Archive with Jefferson Bailey and ended with Gildas Illien and Agnes Simon and the data.bnf.fr team in Paris at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. She spent time discussing the production and consumption of linked open data to support resource discovery and scholarly research support services.
The discussions Ingrid had with colleagues were all focused on the application of linked open data methods, challenges and successes, technologies used, and importantly lessons learned and recommendations for those keen to take their first steps. Linked open data methods are increasingly being applied to aggregate and integrate data and this impacts upon the design of research support services, data and technical infrastructure. A synthesis of the findings will be conveyed to the digital library community at the VALA 2016 conference and a more detailed analysis will be provided in a white paper published by Intersect in Q2 2016.
Data intensive research is in the cloud and scholarly research networks have always been global. New data structuring techniques, such as linked open data, have emerged to enable collaboration, data sharing and data integration. Intersect is supporting this practice change in the Australian digital humanities research community, through data.intersect.org.au and support for capability building and access to data for culture and community researchers.
Ingrid's trip involved the following visits:
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Internet Archive – Jefferson Bailey
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Alexandria Archive Institute (UC Berkeley) – Dr Eric Kansa
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Stanford University Library – Philip Schreur & LD4L Team
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Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (Stanford University) – Gabriel K Wolfenstein & Jon Voss
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Digital Public Library of America – Mark Matienzo
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New York Public Library, NYPL Labs – Ben Vershbow, Mat Miller & NYPL Labs Team
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Cornell University Library, LD4L – Dean Kraaft & LD4L Team
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National Library of Finland – Mikko Lappalainen & FINTO Team
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British Library – Neil Wilson & Corine Deliot
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Europeana – Antoine Isaacs, Valentine Charles & Europeana Team
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National Library of France data.bnf.fr – Gildas Illien, Agnes Simon & data.bnf.fr Team