"Crossing the boundaries of Arts and Sciences: Can Linked Data help Refactoring Natural Sciences?" by Gildas Illien, Chief Librarian, Muséum national d’histoire naturelle (National Natural History Museum Library), Paris. "Atravesar las fronteras entre las artes y las ciencias: ¿pueden los datos enlazados reestructurar las ciencias naturales?" por Gildas Illien, bibliotecario jefe del Museo Nacional de Historia Natural (Biblioteca), París.

1. Crossing the boundaries of
Arts and Sciences:
Can Linked Data help
Refactoring Natural
Sciences?
Gildas ILLIEN, Chief Librarian, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris
VIII Encounter of Documentation Centres of Contemporary Art
Artium, Vitora-Gasteiz, October 19-20 2016
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2. Who I am
 Many people believe I’m a digital expert.
 It’s a joke. I just like organizing things and people to make change happen.
 11 years at the National Library of France (BNF)
 Implemented Web archiving and the legal deposit of the web
 Took part in mass digitization, digital library (Gallica) and digital preservation
 Pushed national library catalogues towards Linked Open Data (data.bnf.fr)
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3. : The short version
Scope: connecting library catalogues (metadata), digital contents and other online
resources spread in silos, from inside and outside (WorldCat, Wikipedia…) the National
Library
Motivations:
 aligning and clustering data and contents about the same things,
 improve online exposure and ranking from Google and other engines,
 simplify and enrich end-user experience,
 encourage use and reuse of data = make most of years of human cataloguing!
Key words for making it happen:
 Quality of metadata, especially authority files (authors, works, things, places…),
 Combining old (MARC) and new (FRBR) bibliographic standards
 Using stable identifiers (URIs), RDF expression
 Implementing smart data computing/mining techniques from outside the library world
 Employing smart people with an open mind (open data licenses, CC-BY compliant)
Lessons learnt: it’s hard to explain, hard to do and to maintain, but it’s really exciting as
when it works it really works!
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4. http://www.slideshare.net/bne/semantic-web-bnfgildasillienhttp://data.bnf.fr/en/about
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5. Why I’m here?
 I received a kind invitation.
 I recently changed job, have provocative ideas and am looking for
compassion and inspiration.
 As the world is changing and as I’m getting older I think I/we might need
to think and work differently with machines and people.
 Digital overload? Data deluge? Sense of loss.
 In this digital and dangerous world, what we miss most, which cultural &
scientific institutions might never dare properly marketing because it seems
against all trends and tools:
 Emotions
 Direct mediation
 Physical experience
 Inspiration
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6. Where I am now
 The Natural History Museum Library: a Sleeping Beauty?
 Amazing heritage and collections (2 M)
 (Most) scientists have gone away (online)
 A lonely planet.
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7. Silos and silence (almost) everywhere
 18 libraries, 72 people: an archipel
 Books, serials, archives, manuscripts, drawings, sculptures, instruments…
 2 distinct services in charge of collection management (but no service
dedicated to public services), 4 catalogues
 An invisible building
 A invisible digital library
Library
entrance
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8. My new challenge: RE-CONNECTING
the library
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9. BUT RECONNECTING WHOM
WITH
WHAT?
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10. ANIMALS ?
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11. GARDENS ?
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12. SCIENTISTS ?
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13. EXPEDITIONS ?
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14. TREASURES ?
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15. PEOPLE ?
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16. My secret plan for now: do linked Data
without data, first
I started digital to get to the physical. I decided to do the other way around here.
Connect the staff INSIDE the library (management, restructuration…)
Connect library staff to library USERS, differently (events, changing space…)
Connect the library to the rest of the Museum (politics, services, communications)
From there, explore new possibilities to develop the library services, targeting new
audiences other than the initial natural scientists
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17. Living plants,
greenhouses
& gardens
LIBRARY
collections &
services
NATURALIST
collections
BOTANIC
collections
Dead plants
& herbarium
Living
animals &
zoos
ZOOLOGIC
collections
Dead
animals &
specimen
MINERAL
collections
GALLERIES
Maritime
stations &
marinarium
RESEARCH
depts. & labs
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18. DESIGN A GARDEN LIBRARY?
A LIBRARY GARDEN ?
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19. DESIGN A ZOO LIBRARY?
A LIBRARY ZOO ?
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20. LIBRARY
collections &
services
Designed by and for
scientists (and now
mostly ignored by
them)
Could serve other
publics in search of
•Emotions
•Direct mediation
•Inspiration
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21. My secret plan for tomorrow:
data.museum
Build a linked data project on top of the new links and communities
created between people
Library catalogues and digital holdings could be connected to :
 Taxonomic databases
 Digital Specimen databases
 Participative sciences (crowdsourcing) databases
 …
Key words for making it happen (again) :
 Quality of authority files (authors, works, things, places…),
 Combining old (MARC) and new (FRBR) bibliographic standards
 stable identifiers (URIs), RDF expression
 smart data computing techniques from outside the library world
 smart people, open mind (open data licenses, CC-BY compliant)
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22. Conclusions
 What if LOD was just - or first- a way to envision and manage projects (not
just standards and tools)?
 Linked data is basically about connecting data on people, things, places
and events to other data (e.g. bibliographic records, digitized contents,
born digital stuff…) and make it all visible on the web, so that users actually
get a chance to use the data your staff spent hours producing.
 If you can’t afford working hard with data and machines, you might just as
well start connecting people, things, places and events to people’s lives.
 It is not possible to connect every data to every data, so the idea is to test
the best connections and alignements in real life first.
 This might give you the right inspiration and directions to play creatively
with your data afterwards. In the meantime, keep focused on the quality of
your data production, otherwise it will never work. Sorry, there’s no magic 
gildas.illien@mnhn.fr
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