Building Resources Together – Linked Open Data for Film Archives

• Published in: Journal of film preservation no. 101; pp. 65 - 73
• Main Author: Heftberger, Adelheid
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English; French; Spanish
• Published: Brussels International Federation of Film Archives 01.10.2019
• Subjects: Archives & records; Cultural heritage; Information sources; Internet resources; Library associations; Library cataloging; Linked Data; Ontology; Web sites; United States > US; Virginia
• ISSN: 1609-2694

The CDC had had the idea of mapping entities to the EN 15907 schema since 2015, and pioneering work had already been carried out by Nicola Mazzanti and Bram Biesbrouck at the the Cinémathèque royale de Belgique. 3 Raymond Drewy presented the invaluable work he had been undertaking at MovieLabs. 4 Some film archives were also forerunners in this field: the Library of Congress (L°C) provided a linked data service on its website, 5 while Sarah Blankfort Clothier presented the new American Film Institute (AFI) project, "Women They Talk About", funded by an National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant, 6 using LOD for gathering data on female film pioneers. 7 Needless to say, there were sometimes widely diverging opinions expressed by the participants. According to metadata specialist Virginia Schilling, this has become more of a necessity for libraries than solely a data experiment: "Libraries can either participate in the larger metadata community via technologies like linked data and the Semantic Web or they can be pushed aside and ignored." [...]we agreed that in order to start using (or creating) LOD within film archives, we should also talk about training courses for our staff. The following were noted as possible next tasks for the CDC: * Research linked data sources and give recommendations * Perhaps make a survey and collect use cases * Find out which information resources/ vocabularies produced by film archives are not available, maybe provide missing resources * Look at Wikidata instances and add others which film archives need * Relate to the FIAF cataloguing manual, e.g., start working on turning the FIAF vocabularies into LOD resources and publish them * Start with a pilot data set, e.g., FIAF's Treasures from the Film Archives (60,000 items) or an unrestricted subset, e.g., from the AFI available via Library of Congress * Help in disseminating information about archives already using LOD by presenting their activities in workshops * Begin training sessions on data literacy and getting started with LOD * Connect more with the library and Semantic Web community For those who want to introduce LOD in their archives, the workshop participants recommended starting with: film works, persons/ names, locations, events, and items.