Presented by Jean Godby at the Minitex Technical Services Symposium, December 6, 2017, St. Paul, MN For the past seven years, OCLC has conducted research and participated in standards initiatives whose goal is to pave the way for the adoption of the Linked Data paradigm as a next-generation solution for the description of resources managed by libraries. With this experience as a backdrop, I will try to tell the story of the library sector's experience with Linked Data. In early experiments, the library community’s legacy data stores were re-imagined as inventories of real-world Things, which could be mechanically converted to RDF and published as Linked Data. But we soon learned that the publication of data in a different format is not enough, and progress stalled. To achieve a higher level of acceptance, we are being asked to demonstrate more rigorously how Linked Data is an improvement over the status quo. At the end of this talk, I will describe promising results from new projects now underway.