Abstract
Libraries as a type of social institution have a long history of collecting, preserving and spreading the knowledge of mankind and have cumulated a vast amount of highly structured data conforming to library and information standards. Among these data, especially, name authority data are fundamentally important for digital humanities. However, traditional library data are not built in the way that digital humanities research requires, which makes it difficult for digital humanities researchers to use them directly. This study is to address this problem through using the Linked Data approach to build knowledge bases in transforming and normalizing name authority data into the format that can be easily deployed by digital humanities research. A name authority database was built on various sources and formed the content infrastructure to provide Linked Open Data services, which enables sophisticated searches and uses of document resources knowledge base with multiple types of documents and multimedia, instead of digital collections with only a keyword search function. The process of design and development as well as the way through which resources are interlinked are described in detail in this paper.
Highlights
With the advent of digital humanities, humanities research has been through a “paradigm shift” (Kuhn, 1970)
Name authority control is an important tool for libraries
Traditional library data are not built in the way that digital humanities research requires, which makes it difficult for digital humanities researchers to use them directly
Summary
With the advent of digital humanities, humanities research has been through a “paradigm shift” (Kuhn, 1970). A person's date of birth, death, where the events happened, and other related information about the person such as employment, social activities, and intellectual works are the fundamental building blocks of society and history. It becomes even more important to maintain a name authority list to differentiate a person from another and aggregate related information about one person. Researchers at Shanghai Library aim to leverage traditional name authority files and explore expanding name authority into digital humanities by using Linked Open Data (LOD) to construct a new name authority database that amalgamates names from genealogy, rare book collections, archives, and other special collections of the Shanghai Library. The new name authority database is the fundamental block of the digital humanities infrastructure of Shanghai Library that provides services to researchers and ensures its openness, consistency, and high efficiency
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