Call for Use Cases: Library Linked Data- Use Case of the French National Library (BnF)

Hi,

here is a Use Case of the French National Library (BnF).

Best regards,
Romain Wenz 
Expert métadonnées, 
Département de l'Information Bibliographique et Numérique
Bibliothèque nationale de France
Quai François Mauriac
75706 Paris cedex 13
33 (0)1 53 79 37 39


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Name
 Use_Case_data.bnf 
Owner
romain.wenz@bnf.fr
Background and Current Practice

Until now, the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) makes different 
kinds of resources available on the Web. On the first hand, our library 
catalogue, with more than 12 million records, all structured and linked 
together. It relies on two million accurate and reliable authority records 
about authors, organisations, works and subjects. Through the legal 
deposit, all recent French publications are covered. Gallica (
http://gallica.bnf.fr) is our own digital library, with a million online 
documents. About a third of them are searchable in full text, from the 
Gallica portal. But we also have a specific online catalogue describing 
manuscripts and special collections using the EAD DTD, a whole set of 
online exhibitions (no standardized metadata format) and free reference 
services allowing anyone to ask a Librarian.
Goal
- Make our resources easier to find. 
Target Audience
- General public.
- Computer programs and crawlers.
Use Case Scenario
- Jean-Pierre and Marie-Odile live in a pretty French town. They are not 
used to go to the local library website, or the local library catalogue, 
or any library website for that matter. Yet, they use the Internet almost 
anytime they need information. One day, they want to find some information 
regarding Victor Hugo's Les travailleurs de la mer. They find Web pages 
from Wikipedia, Amazon, and the BnF. Jean-Pierre advises Marie-Odile to 
follow the BnF link, because he thinks that information coming from a 
public institution should be reliable. There, he finds a HTML page about 
Victor Hugo's Les travailleurs de la mer. Marie-Odile notices that BnF 
owns the original manuscript by Victor Hugo. Jean-Pierre is amazed by the 
number of different editions ; he can even access some of them online 
through Gallica. There is also an online exhibition which provides many 
pictures and information about Victor hugo and his writings related to the 
sea. Finally, they can find links to a page about Victor Hugo, and pages 
about other related works, like the 1917 movie Les travailleurs de la mer
by André Antoine. Jean-Pierre creates a blog about Les travailleurs de la 
mer, and adds a link to the BnF page.
Application of linked data for the given use case
-       Bring together data from several bases, with a scalable data 
model.
-       Use this data to publish structured HTML Web pages.
-       Align and link with other existing resources.
Related Vocabularies (optional) 
- skos (concept level), foaf (Agents), DC (basic bibliographic info) and 
rda (Works- manifestations relationships, roles for agents). 
Problems and Limitations
- The "Web of data" needs to be advocated because it has a cost and no 
obvious benefit to end users.
- The data model could easily become too complex. Source data is not 
FRBRised, and partly not standardised.
- Legal issue: With the current legal restrictions, it would be necessary 
to contact us for commercial re-use.
Related Use Cases and Unanticipated Uses (optional)
- Possible uses are quite broad (e.g. general interest, bibliography, 
access to digital collections, homework, genealogy, online bookselling 
business, other digital libraries?).


Exposition  La France de Raymond Depardon  - jusqu'au 9 janvier 2011 - BnF - François-Mitterrand / Grande Galerie 
Avant d'imprimer, pensez à l'environnement.