Category: announcements

Just for the fun of it, I submitted a video postcard for Ignite Smithsonian, taking place 4/11/11. I was trying to capture the excitement of the emerging LODLAM community, in a 30 second spot.

“Do you remember
when libraries, archives, and museums
captured imaginations
by connecting information

and led the internet revolution?

It’s happening again.”

We’re excited to announce that the International Linked Open Data in Libraries Archives & Museums Summit has received a Digital Start-up Grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities.  NEH Funding will focus on US support of Linked Open Data in the humanities, specifically:

• Institutional decision makers can gain a firm grasp on the techniques, technology and terminology of Linked Open Data.
• Collaborative strategy will be developed to forward the adoption and promotion of Linked Open Data in the humanities in the United States.
• Actionable steps and strategies for sharing, publishing and licensing structured data on the Web will be widely distributed and publicized.

The NEH joins the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in their generous support of the Summit.  The Sloan Foundation will support international participants and those from the sciences and humanities.  Sloan funding also enables us to continue outreach and forward momentum on LOD-LAM efforts during the year following the Summit, including meetings and panels at various industry and sector conferences globally.

The International Linked Open Data in Archives, Libraries, and Museums is the first gathering of its kind, and is being hosted by the Internet Archive in San Francisco, CA June 2-3, 2011.

I’m excited to announce the list of participants for the LOD-LAM Summit today. As you can see, we’ve expanded the number of participants quite a bit due to the interest and the fact that many participants were able to get support from their institutions to attend.

As you know,the LOD-LAM Summit will be organized using the Open Space Technology format. If you haven’t experienced a meeting or unconference like that before (like FooCamp, BarCamp, THATCamp or the like), it might be a little unnerving at first, but don’t worry, I promise you it will come naturally soon. The bottom line is that we’re creating an open space to explore one question, which is “How can we move Linked Open Data forward in libraries, archives, and museums in the next year?” We’ll set the agenda together in the first hour of our meeting, assuring that the issues that are most important to you will be addressed. It will make for an exciting and exhausting two days, but you’ll be amazed at what we accomplish.

At the beginning of our meeting, we’ll start in a circle. After a quick introduction, we’ll begin to post our session ideas into an open framework of breakout rooms and time slots. We’ll work together to combine and coordinate sessions. We’ll confab, collaborate, have heated discussions, hack.

I’d like to open that circle virtually right now and invite you to share your ideas on this blog as you see fit. You can edit your bio pages and update your projects as you like. You can start posting and exploring session ideas now (just be sure to use the SessionIdeas category), you can discover and work with a good chunk of the public raw data of the participant list (and let me know if you need more). You can start to incorporate RDF or RDFa into this site, build visualizations, post reading lists.

While in-person attendance at the LOD-LAM Summit is limited by space and budget, the ongoing proceedings and discussions are open to all. Our hope is that we will continue the conversation in various and widespread venues over the next year. There’s already been some great discussion on the LOD-LAM Google Group, which is open to anyone who’s interested.

I’ve been amazed at the energy and enthusiasm around this Summit from the beginning, and I’m very excited to see where it leads us.

We’ve emailed all LOD-LAM Summit invitations and travel offerings at this point, so if you have applied to attend the Summit and have not received a response, please let me know. To be clear: every applicant was sent a response, so if you didn’t receive anything, please contact me. We’re having an awful time with spam filters.

Of course, we had more attendees than we could afford to get here physically, but hope to continue the conversation online here and at regional conferences and meetups in the coming years. There are so many great projects in the works and one thing we hope to do right off the bat is disseminate a list of the many LOD-LAM projects in action already. Thanks to everyone who took the time to put in an application for the Summit or the earlier survey—there’s no question that there’s a demand for more information and resources for this developing field.

Applications are now closed. Thanks to everyone who applied and helped spread the word. We received an overwhelming response and will do our best to facilitate as many participants as possible. Official invitations will be sent via e-mail on Monday March 7.

We realize that with larger institutions there are often multiple qualified individuals, and we’re trying to find a way to facilitate that. If space permits and institutions cover travel costs of additional delegates, we may be able to facilitate two delegates from bigger institutions, assuming they are from different departments or schools, etc. Unfortunately, we won’t really know if that’s possible until Feb. 28. If you have several people very interested in attending, we suggest that you submit multiple individual applications and make note of the preferred person in the notes.

Applications are now open for the International Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives, and Museums Summit, taking place in San Francisco June 2-3, 2011.

We will be accepting applications beginning at 8am, PST February 1, 2011, and closing 5pm PST, February 28, 2011. Participants will be selected and notified by March 7, 5pm PST.

We’re pleased to announce that the International Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives, and Museums Summit will be held in San Francisco, CA USA June 2-3, 2011.

You can read about the details on the About page, but the important thing to remember is that applications will open on Feb. 1, 2011.  We encourage you to apply early, as the window will only be open until Feb. 28, 2011.  Feel free to disseminate this news far and wide.