lcsh.info

On May 1st the id.loc.gov service was announced to the public. The service's first offering is the Library of Congress Subject Headings that were once present here on lcsh.info.

It was always my intention to use lcsh.info as an experimental space to inform a similar service at id.loc.gov. With the help of all the comments here and elsewhere on the utility of a library linked-data the service at loc.gov is now a reality.

You'll find that concept identifiers here at http://lcsh.info will now permanently redirect to http://id.loc.gov/authorities

    uqbar:~ ed$ curl -I http://lcsh.info/sh95000541
    HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
    Date: Sun, 03 May 2009 14:46:25 GMT
    Server: Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) DAV/2 SVN/1.4.6
    PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.4 with Suhosin-Patch mod_wsgi/1.3
    Python/2.5.2
    Location: http://id.loc.gov/authorities/sh95000541
    Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
    

This is to help people who have created links to lcsh.info and periodically scrub them. I plan on leaving lcsh.info up and running till January 1st, 2010 to give people time to notice the new URL for these resources.

Marc XML data harvested from authorities.loc.gov remains available on Fred 2.0.

I haven’t repaired the data yet to correct for damaged LCCN’s in the translation.

On December 18th I was asked to shut off lcsh.info by the Library of Congress. As an LC employee I really did not have much choice other than to comply.

The lcsh.info domain was registered by me in order to demonstrate how the Library of Congress Subject Headings could be represented as a Semantic Web application using SKOS . In particular I was eager to get feedback on how the data was being published with respect to Linked Data best practices. I got lots of great feedback, wrote a paper which I presented at DC2008, and learned that other institutions like the W3C and the Royal Library of Sweden were beginning to use URIs for concepts from lcsh.info in their metadata.

It was always my intention for concept URIs at lcsh.info to be cool. I advertised the service as ‘experimental’ and indicated it was going to hopefully inform the development of a similar continually updated service at LC. I had the good fortune to have a shared server with Kevin Clarke, and others from the code4lib community where I could spend $5.00/month on making the service available.

My thought was I could leave the service running until there was something similar at LC that I could redirect the concept URIs to. After a year or two when people had rewritten their data to point at loc.gov I could retire lcsh.info. I never imagined I would be asked by LC to take it down. Some people who have been around the block a few more times than me saw this coming (you know who you are) and I apologize for not taking your concerns more seriously.

So here’s this blog. I put it here so you could leave your comments and thoughts. Feel free to comment on this post, or start a new post by registering with the site. It should accept your OpenID if you have one. Your input and criticism are most welcome. 

LC is still considering running a service like lcsh.info at loc.gov, but it’s not there for me to link to yet. Please accept my apologies, and leave your comments (however brief) here.