Casalini Libri - @Cult, a leading international bibliographic agency and provider of information management solutions for the cultural heritage sector, launched Shared Virtual Discovery Environment (Share VDE) in 2017.
This library-driven initiative aims to bring the enormous quantity of data produced and curated by libraries into the broader world of information. Through Share VDE, libraries can link their data and resources to other libraries across the world which opens to a new level of cooperation among international organisations. Now librarians and patrons can find the full description of the author, topic, or resource they need no matter where the physical material is located.
Libraries hold vast quantities of data, metadata, and resources that have historically been siloed away from other libraries, indexes, and search engines. Users would have to search a specific library’s data in order to find information on a book they were looking for, and would still not find the context of that particular book in the rest of the knowledge base. The work of Casalini Libri - @Cult in resolving the entities within library data and converting opaque XML to the RDF-based BIBFRAME data standard provides libraries around the world with the opportunity to exchange and enrich their data.
The Share VDE project continues to expand. From an initial group of 20 North American based library partners, it now processes, links, and maintains 24 billion triples (about 2 TB of data) within Stardog. As Share VDE grows, each new library will contribute up to 2 billion more triples to the expanding knowledge base.
