Rethink the Link: How to accomplish Linked Data on a budget

Presenter(s)

• David Newbury - Head of Software @ Getty

Over the past five years, Getty has built out a comprehensive suite of linked data applications and infrastructure—the tools needed to try out the technologies that we\’ve all been writing about over the past decade and see if they work in practice.

Spoiler: they do.

However, some of the parts that we thought most important turned out to be inconsequential, and other parts were critical in a way that was unexpected as we began.  In particular, the benefits of linking over semantics, the power of reconciliation, the reuse of off-the-shelf tools, and the importance of local expertise over global knowledge.

These will be framed within a discussion of the six levels of linking within Linked Data:
1. Authority: Providing a consistent way to identify both entities and the institution providing information

2. Reconciliation: using authorities and thesauri to disambiguate between similar real world entities

3. Bi-directional linking: making and publishing connections between systems and institutions

4. Aggregation: Enhancing discovery by providing search and access to information across collections

5. Interoperability: Developing interfaces that present information from many sources in a single way

6. Reuse: Allowing one institution to import information from another while maintaining provenance

In this paper, I will describe both the lessons learned in trying to implement each of these six levels, using Getty\’s archives, collections, and vocabularies as our case study, and I will point to practical, low-cost, low-effort tools and techniques that can be implement much of what we learned at other institutions, particularly ones that can\’t muster the scale that Getty can.

No code? No problem. Using no-code methods to build and ship projects with minimal staff support, bu

Presenter(s)

• Josh Schnapf - Head of Creative Services @ Brandywine Museum of Art

Imagine this: you work for a museum that does not have a dedicated programmer on staff fluent in Python, Java, or PHP. Okay, maybe that\’s not so hard to envision. Having worked in digital communications with smaller-sized museums for nearly 15 years, I have been involved in dozens of digital projects and found that there has never been an easier time to produce high-quality, custom products without the need for code.

You probably used no-code tools before, whether you realize it or not. Think Squarespace, Wix, or Mailchimp. But there is also a wealth of new low-code and no-code tools that may not be as familiar to you. These new platforms rely less on templates and are far more viable for complex projects. I want to introduce (or perhaps re-introduce) you to tools such as Webflow, Readymag, Figma, Airtable, and more.

This paper will look at the incredible potential of low-code/no-code tools, especially for smaller institutions. It will explore different use cases, argue for the viability of no-code platforms, give examples of no-code tools that may be relevant to Museum projects, and provide resources to learn more about no-code development.

I’ve used no-code tools to build exhibition microsites, digital guides, and web apps. In February 2020, the Brandywine Museum of Art opened an important exhibition marking the 100th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which granted women the right to vote. It took years of work that led up to the exhibition opening. Unfortunately, as you can likely guess from the date it opened, the museum closed only a few weeks into the run of the exhibition due to the global pandemic. With the doors shut, our staff looked at ways to share the exhibition\’s important content with our audience at home. With almost no budget and a timeline of only 2–3 weeks to get it online, we turned to a no-code tool called Readymag. Readymag is a browser-based design tool suited for online publications—a