Princeton

In March 2015, Princeton University acquired the personal library of Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). Of the roughly 16,000 published books and other items in the library, a significant number have been heavily annotated, and many bear personal dedications to Derrida from other philosophers and theorists, including Roland Barthes, Giorgio Agamben, and Emmanuel Levinas. To date, approximately three thousand items with dedications have been identified. Taking this unique collection as a proving ground, the overarching goal of Princeton’s LD4P project is to explore, define, and implement linked data standards for the description of special collections materials. In collaboration with LD4P colleagues at Cornell and Columbia, Princeton will participate in the definition of a new linked data ontology for the description of special collections materials. In the context of the Derrida collection, Princeton’s contribution to this effort will focus on data modeling for annotations. Although emerging standards like the W3C’s Open Annotation Data Model and Web Annotation Data Model have made strides toward representing and sharing user-generated annotations on the Web, these high-level protocols do not address the semantics of manuscript annotations specifically, or the relation between original and transcribed annotations (as reflected, for example, in digital facsimile editions). In tandem with its LD4P ontology work, Princeton will also create original metadata for a representative selection of items in the Derrida collection that include personal dedications addressed to Derrida. The relationships encoded in these dedications will allow project participants to produce an RDF data set that can be used by scholars who are interested in studying Derrida’s social and intellectual networks. Princeton’s efforts will also build on the work of projects like the Linked Open Data for Special Collections project of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with the goal of developing BIBFRAME-specific conversion routines for legacy metadata in the special collections domain.