Libhub Initiative

In June 2014, at the American Library Association Conference in Las Vegas, Zepheira announced the Libhub Initiative, a project that aims to raise the visibility of libraries on the Web by “actively exploring” BIBFRAME and Linked Data. Its strategy is based on automatically exportation and conversion of library MARC21 records into BIBFRAME, and its transformation into Linked Data. Finally, publishing on the Web the transformed and connected content.

Nowadays, the Libhub Initiative is in an experimental phase: hearing from the broader community, gauging interest and willingness to get involved, and recruiting Active Supporter, Interested Participating Libraries, Partners, and Sponsors. During this experimental phase there are no costs to libraries because the main objective is to create a very big and collaborative database (cloud service) that allows library data to be discoverable and presented at or near the top of Web search engines page results.

It’s interesting to know that Eric Miller, Zepheira’s President, prior to founding Zepheira, led the Semantic Web Initiative for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at MIT, and that in 2011 the Library of Congress contracted with Zepheira to define the way forward for moving library data into the Web. Actually, for the past 2 years, Zepheira has been defining BIBFRAME.

Another interesting information to evaluate the importance of this project is to know that amongst its sponsors and partners we can find EBSCO, Innovative, SirsiDynix, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek and Denver Public Library.

Without a doubt, Libhub Initiative is a project that deserve our special attention.

Enjoy it!

Andreu Sulé

University of Barcelona