The map as a search box: using linked data to create a geographic discovery system

Abstract

This article describes a bibliographic mapping project recently undertaken at the Library of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW). The MARC Advisory Committee recently approved an update to MARC that enables the use of dereferenceable Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) in MARC subfield $0. The ISAW Library has taken advantage of MARC’s new openness to URIs, using identifiers from the linked data gazetteer Pleiades in MARC records and using this metadata to create maps representing our library’s holdings. By populating our MARC records with URIs from Pleiades, an online, linked open data (LOD) gazetteer of the ancient world, we are able to create maps of the geographic metadata in our library’s catalog. This article describes the background, procedures, and potential future directions for this collection-mapping project.