Student’s Name:
Mollie Echeverría
Course Title:
LIS 698, Practicum/Seminar
Instructor:
Dr. Tula Giannini
Site Location Name:
The Whitney Museum of American Art
Site Supervisor’s Name and Title:
Farris Wahbeh, Director, Research Resources
Project Title:
Linked Open Data at the Whitney Museum
Project Abstract:
This project is the culmination of my work as a Graduate Fellow in the Research Resources Department of the Whitney Museum during the 2016-17 academic year. The Pratt School of Information Linked Open Data for Museums Fellowship, started in 2015, focuses on exploring the applicability and use of linked open data in cultural heritage institutions. Building on the work of Joshua Dull, Pratt’s first LOD Fellow during the 2015-16 term, I wanted to explore current best-practices for publishing linked data in museums, as well as methods of expressing art documentation-specific concepts like object provenance in a semantically structured way. The result of my research over the past year is a 77-page proposal for how the Whitney might go about publishing its collection data as linked data in the future. This proposal includes guidelines for URI (unique resource identifier) publication and structure, definitions and mappings for the metadata terms these URIs would include, sample URIs for one of the Whitney’s objects, and guidelines for the use of OpenRefine as a linked data creation tool.