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Why Digital Data Collections Are Important

The silo is a well-worn metaphor in information systems used to illustrate separateness, isolation, and lack of connectivity. Through the many iterations of system development, libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) have sought to avoid silos and find the sweet spot between interface design and metadata interoperability. This effort is being pushed forward with work in the linked open data (LOD) field. LOD is composed of two interrelated but very separate ideas: that computer harvestable and interoperable metadata (linked data) is a transformative data service, and that an open license enables researchers to use this data in new and unexpected ways. Data are increasingly the lingua franca of interdisciplinary research. Digital humanities, e-science, and data journalism are three examples of fields that are exploring new research and publishing models. These fields are finding that alternative forms of community building and publishing are changing our view of the value of open data. This often means a re-consideration of the core literacies required, including data processing, data visualization, and new research methods. For a quick introduction to how the journalism profession is approaching these issues, check out the Stanford University (http://datajournalism.stanford.edu) and the University of California, Berkeley (http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu) data journalism sites. LAMs are asking similar questions, but are often starting at a different point than these other fields. LAMs have historically been the curators of data and objects, and they are expending considerable effort to creating digital and data collections that support emerging fields of scholarship. For example, LAMs are engaging with each other to bring together physically separated collections through digitization and publishing. Often talked about as “virtual reunification” (Unsworth 2006; Punzalan 2012), this process of combining data