2012-06-17T084120/forth_Solr.zip

The Forth Bridge) is an iconic nineteenth century cantilever rail bridge that spans the Firth of Forth, connecting the city of Edinburgh with the county of Fife and the north of Scotland. In May 2012 the bridge was put forward for consideration to become a UNESCO World Heritage site. The National Library of Scotland holds a copy of The Forth Bridge illustrations 1886-1887. The 40 photographs in the volume have been digitised and are available from the the Library's Digital Gallery. This is the first data set that the Library has released as open data. The data set is SolrXML associated with the images in the Digital Gallery. There are 40 XML files that describe each photograph and 1 XML file (74464117.xml) that describes the collection and 1 XML file (74466699.xml) that describes the super collection, Scottish Bridges. The images are described following the Anglo American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2) and the vocabularies used included The Getty Institute's Arts and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), Library of Congress Thesaurus for Graphic Materials II, The Getty Institute's Thesaurus for Geographic Names and others. We plan to supply documentation to explain the SolrXML by end of June 2012. We also plan to transform the SolrXML to MODS and Dublin Core Terms by end of July 2012. We will also work on developing an RDF version, replacing the literals with URIs where possible hopefully having this complete by early August 2012. By the end of 2012 we plan to make available datasets associated with The Tay Bridge enquiry photographs and The Haig Collection of World War 1 photographs. National Library of Scotland is in the early stages of preparing subsets of its data as open data and we want to learn: if the data we supply is useful, if we should supply in other formats, how our data is used, any tips for preparing linked open data. If you have questions you can contact me, Gill Hamilton, Systems Librarian, National Library of Scotland. g.hamiltonATnls.uk