Part of making the argument for open collections data is showing what can be done with it. Trevor Muñoz’s recent blog post, in which he plays with the NYPL’s open data from the “What’s on the Menu?” project, explains how he uses the collection data as a testbed for data curation work. As Muñoz states:
I’m particularly interested right now in work that data curators can do to build secondary and tertiary resources—reference materials, if you will—around data. I mean particularly reference materials that draw on the skills of people with training in library and information science, things like indexes. These types of organized systems of description can be one way to provide additional value over full text search (which, for many kinds of data sets, e.g., a table of numerical readings, is not particularly effective anyway).
After evaluating the data release against Tim Berners Lee’s 5 Star Linked Open Data Scale, Muñoz begins the process of creating a useful index to the names of the dishes represented in the collection, introducing linked data concepts and showcasing the work (and potential work) of data curators along the way.
