Libraries, archives and museums

Principles that research data should be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable, published in Scientific Data in March 2016.

Free tagging by users combined with volunteers who link synonymous tags to canonical ones, keeping the users' words while adding a controlled structure; named by Julia Bullard.

Agreed list of terms for indexing and retrieval, so that one subject is always described the same way.

Classification that describes a subject by combining independent facets, such as topic, place and time, instead of placing it in one fixed hierarchy.

Data that describes other data or documents, such as author, date, subject or format.

Classification of things or concepts into a hierarchy of categories.

Controlled vocabulary whose terms are linked by broader, narrower, related and preferred-term relations.

Paul Otlet's treatise on organising documents and knowledge, setting out the field he called documentation.

Book edited by Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom applying Ostrom's research on how communities sustain shared resources to knowledge: digital libraries, open access, open-source software and the rules that keep them from being depleted or enclosed.

2014 PLoS ONE study of millions of web links in scholarly articles, finding that about one in five articles cites web resources that have since vanished or changed: link rot measured at scale.

2018 paper by Julia Bullard in Knowledge Organization comparing three user-generated collections that structure their tags through human judgment, and proposing the curated folksonomy as an object of study.

Library classification that sorts knowledge into ten main classes with decimal subdivisions, first published by Melvil Dewey in 1876.

Library classification adapted from Dewey's system by Otlet and La Fontaine to index all recorded knowledge; still maintained today.

S.R. Ranganathan's library classification, which builds subject numbers from facets joined by colons.

MAchine-Readable Cataloging: formats for library catalogue records, developed by Henriette Avram at the Library of Congress between 1965 and 1968 so that libraries could share records by computer; a US national standard by 1971 and international by 1973. MARC 21 (1999) is still the predominant format.

Guidelines for encoding texts for scholarly study, from a 1987 meeting of humanities and computing scholars at Vassar College; P3 appeared in 1994, P4 moved to XML in 2002 and P5 followed in 2007. It is the standard markup of the digital humanities.

System for assigning and resolving persistent identifiers, developed and operated by CNRI; DOIs are Handle System handles under the prefix 10.

Persistent Uniform Resource Locator: a web address that points at a resolver instead of the resource, so the target can move without breaking links. OCLC introduced it in 1995 and ran purl.org, where Dublin Core and many other vocabularies keep their namespaces, until it handed the service to the Internet Archive in September 2016.

Small set of metadata elements, such as title, creator and date, for describing resources on the Web; it began at a 1995 workshop in Dublin, Ohio.

Markup standard for archival finding aids, begun at Berkeley in the early 1990s and released in 1998; it is maintained by the Society of American Archivists and the Library of Congress, with EAD3 from 2015.

Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records: IFLA's conceptual model of the bibliographic universe as entities and relationships, separating the work from its expressions, manifestations and items; its final report was published in 1998.

Ontology for museum and cultural heritage documentation from ICOM's documentation committee, first issued in 1999 and an ISO standard since 2006. It describes objects through the events in their history, such as production, acquisition and movement, so that records from different institutions can be integrated.

Persistent identifier for documents and data, introduced in 2000. A DOI names the object rather than where it is stored, and resolves through doi.org; it is built on the Handle System and fits within the URI system.

ISO standard for representing knowledge as topics, associations and occurrences; similar in expressive power to RDF and developed alongside it.

XML standard for legislative, judicial and executive documents, begun in 2004 by the UN for African parliaments and adopted by OASIS as LegalDocML in August 2018; its identifiers follow the FRBR model of work, expression and manifestation.

Formal ontology joining the librarians' FRBR model with the museums' CIDOC CRM, begun in 2006, so that bibliographic and museum records share one model.

W3C vocabulary for publishing thesauri, classification schemes and subject headings as Linked Data; a Recommendation since August 2009.

Library of Congress model for bibliographic data based on Linked Data, designed to replace the MARC formats; work began in 2012 and version 2.0 followed in 2016.

Shared web APIs for digitised images, proposed in late 2011 by research libraries including the British Library, Stanford, the Bodleian and the BnF. Its Image API (2012) serves zoomable images, and its Presentation API (2013) describes books and artworks as JSON-LD manifests, so any viewer can show any library's images.

Community profile of the CIDOC CRM for describing artworks and other heritage objects, in JSON-LD and using the Getty Vocabularies, so that museum data is practical for developers; started in 2016.

The International Council on Archives' standard for archival description as a graph of records, agents, activities and their relations, with a conceptual model and an ontology (RiC-O). Work began in 2012, a draft followed in 2016, and version 1.0 was released in 2023–2024; it extends and replaces the ICA's four earlier description standards, including ISAD(G).

IFLA's 2017 conceptual model of bibliographic information, which consolidates FRBR and its companion models for authority and subject data.

Europeana's RDF model for cultural heritage metadata. It reuses Dublin Core, SKOS and OAI-ORE so that each provider's own description is kept alongside Europeana's additions; it replaced the flat Europeana Semantic Elements.

Thesauri for art and cultural heritage: the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (from 1981), the Thesaurus of Geographic Names and the Union List of Artist Names. Published as linked open data from February 2014 under an open attribution licence.

The EU's multilingual thesaurus of the subjects of its work, maintained by the Publications Office since 1984 in the 24 official languages and more.

Service that links the name authority files of national libraries and merges records for the same person or organization into one cluster. Begun in 1998 by the Library of Congress, the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek and OCLC; it now draws on more than 50 organizations in over 30 countries.

The Internet Archive's public archive of the Web, open since 25 October 2001 and built from crawls going back to 1996; for many dead links and vanished sites it is the only copy left, kept by a nonprofit funded mainly by donations and grants.

Internet Archive project to build 'one web page for every book ever published', begun in 2007 with Aaron Swartz.

European Union portal to the digitised collections of thousands of cultural heritage institutions, launched in November 2008; it aggregates their metadata with the Europeana Data Model and publishes it as Linked Open Data.

Library of Congress Linked Data Service, publishing its authorities and vocabularies at stable URIs; it opened with the Subject Headings in April 2009.

Open gazetteer of ancient places, built from the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World by NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World and the Ancient World Mapping Center; each place has a stable URI, and its data is CC BY.

National library of the United States; it created the MARC formats in the 1960s and BIBFRAME to replace them.

Institution founded by Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine in Brussels to collect and index the world's knowledge on index cards. Its archive is now kept in Mons.

Worldwide organisation of museums and museum professionals, founded in 1946; its documentation committee, CIDOC, wrote the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model.

International Organization for Standardization, which publishes GQL and Topic Maps.

Global library cooperative in Dublin, Ohio, which publishes the Dewey Decimal Classification and hosted the first Dublin Core workshop.

Art-history research institute in Los Angeles, founded in 1985, that compiles the Getty Vocabularies.

Non-profit digital library in San Francisco that runs the Wayback Machine and Open Library.

Non-profit created in 1997 to develop and govern the DOI system.

Publishers' association launched in early 2000 to link citations across journals with DOIs; the largest DOI registration agency for scholarly work.

International organisation of archives and archivists, which sets the standards for archival description, from ISAD(G) to Records in Contexts.

American librarian who published the Dewey Decimal Classification in 1876; the UDC was built on his numbers.

Belgian lawyer and politician who co-founded the Mundaneum and the Universal Decimal Classification with Paul Otlet, and won the 1913 Nobel Peace Prize.

Belgian bibliographer who planned a universal index of recorded knowledge and co-founded the Mundaneum with Henri La Fontaine.

Indian mathematician and librarian who devised Colon Classification (1933), the first major faceted classification, and the five laws of library science.

American computer programmer and systems analyst who developed the MARC format at the Library of Congress in 1965–68.

British digital-humanities scholar who co-edited the Text Encoding Initiative's guidelines with Michael Sperberg-McQueen, including P3 in 1994.

American computer engineer who founded the Internet Archive in 1996 and was one of Open Library's creators.

American programmer and activist who helped write the RSS 1.0 specification as a teenager, led early work on Open Library, and co-founded Reddit.

Co-editor of the SKOS Reference (2009).

Markup scholar who co-edited the Text Encoding Initiative's guidelines and XML 1.0.

American librarian and scholar of the knowledge commons, co-editor with Elinor Ostrom of 'Understanding Knowledge as a Commons'.

Archivist and technologist who led the work at Berkeley in the early 1990s that produced Encoded Archival Description.

Worked on Web metadata at OCLC, where his conversations with Stuart Weibel led to Dublin Core, and later led the W3C Semantic Web Activity.

OCLC researcher who developed the PURL concept with Stuart Weibel in 1995.

Information scientist who studies classification in volunteer communities and named the curated folksonomy.

Information scientist who led the development of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model and its harmonisation with FRBR.

Computer scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, lead author of 'Scholarly Context Not Found' (2014).

Digital cultural heritage specialist, then at the Getty, now at Yale; lead editor of the W3C Web Annotation Data Model.

University of Manchester researcher and co-editor of the SKOS Reference (2009).

Co-author of RFC 7946 (2016), the IETF standard for GeoJSON, and an associate editor of the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places.

OCLC researcher whose work with Eric Miller led to the 1995 workshop in Dublin, Ohio, that created Dublin Core.

Managing editor of Pleiades, the gazetteer of ancient places, at New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World.