From Hydraconnect 2016

1. DARTM
O
UTH COLLEGE
LIBRARY
INSPIRING IDEAS
Linked Name AuthorityThe Linked-what-now?
Linked Name Authority. Like a name authority file, but meant to
support linked data.
Oh. But why do you need that? Don’t you have an authority file?
Sure. This is different though. It automatically creates IDs for Dartmouth
people and organizations based on feeds from other systems and ingest of his-
torical data. And LNA is a Hydra app, which fits the rest of our repo ecosystem.
Why do that, if you already have other systems?
Because we have a lot of other systems and not all of the data we need is in any
one of them. Even if you just look at current faculty, Dartmouth has a couple of dif-
ferent databases that are considered the system of record by different parts of
campus. LNA pulls from each of them and creates a place where the data can be
normalized.
Ugh.
Yeah. But we hear that’s how it is at a lot of places. This is a practical compromise that
solves our immediate problem.
What problem is that?
We need standardized metadata on Dartmouth faculty and organizations to run our institutional
repository, and we want to get it in as automated a way as we can. This way we get solid IDs that we can
work with as linked data. We also pull publication information from yet another system, Symplectic Elements.
In the LNA, we relate that publication metadata to the people and organizations at Dartmouth that it creates
IDs for.
So this is your repo then?
No, LNA is a separate system. Maintaining IDs for people and orgs is a different function that is useful beyond
the institutional repository, so we split it out. It will just feed the repo.
But you said LNA harvests article metadata from Elements. Why do that outside your repo?
Not every article that Elements finds can go into the repository. It might pre-date Dartmouth’s
Open Access Policy, or it might be embargoed, or faculty may just not want it in the IR. We still
want to be able to generate a complete record of the faculty member’s publications though,
whether they’re in the repo or not–we want to give them RSS feeds and help on their activity re-
ports. LNA stores that complete publication list and only sends an article into the repository
workflow if we have rights to reproduce it.
How does LNA know if you have rights to put an article in the repo?
Librarians. Dartmouth is mediated deposit all the way. A librarian adds license info to each article
in the LNA. Librarians also fix things like inconsistent metadata coming into Elements from differ-
ent article sources. They’re great.
And then articles with the right license are sent to your repository?
Well, they will be once we have a repository. We’re building a workflow manager that links Elements, LNA,
and our repository, so we can track an article as it moves through each system. It’s all connected togeth-
er with APIs, which also allow data to be read by systems outside Dartmouth.
Sounds complicated.
It’s a complicated world, my friend. But the workflow tool makes it a lot simpler.
So if this is linked data, what does it look like?
Pretty standard. Person data is mostly FOAF and vCard, Organizations are
org and skos, and articles are dc, bibo, and ali for licenses. There are
docs linked from our github site.
Oh? What’s that?
https://github.com/DartmouthDSC/LinkedNameAuthority
Cool.
Yeah, just be aware we’re still working on it if you start poking
around. The librarians are putting it through testing now. If you
want to check it out in
its current state,
go for it!
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LNA FAQ
John Bell <john.p.bell@dartmouth.edu> | Eric Bivona <eric.j.bivona@dartmouth.edu>