LINCS Blog

Jessica and Goliath: Learning 3M and CIDOC CRM

  • LINCS Project
  • October 20, 2022

— Ze Xi (Jessica) Ye, LINCS metadata co-op — During my graduate courses in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, I gained a high-level understanding of Linked Open Data (LOD) and the CIDOC CRM ontology, a theoretical and practical tool for information integration in the field of cultural heritage. Because I am an Archives […]

— Kate LeBere, LINCS vocabularies and documentation co-op — If each part of a ship were replaced over time, when, if ever, does it become a new ship? Little did Heraclitus, Plato, and others know that the problems posed by the “Ship of Theseus” paradox would continue to vex digital humanists in the twenty-first century. […]

The Good Enough Metadata Specialist

  • LINCS Project
  • April 13, 2022

— Emily McKibbon, LINCS metadata co-op — My first job in the museums field was in 2008, right at the height of the Great Recession. The digitization team I joined had just lost roughly a quarter of their staff in a series of buyouts and layoffs, and the mood was grim. We were tasked with […]

What Is Extract Transform Load?

  • LINCS Project
  • October 27, 2021
A general Extract Transform Load process

— Justin Francis, LINCS Junior Programmer — A general Extract Transform Load process In data science there is a commonly used process called extract-transform-load (ETL). ETL involves three main steps:  1. Extract data from a source,  2. Transform the data via data cleansing and data manipulation, and  3. Load the transformed data to a data […]

Colourful painting with leave and floral elements

— Sarah Mousseau, LINCS undergraduate research assistant — In the summer of 2020, I was hired as a research assistant with the University of Guelph’s Bachinski/Chu Print Study Collection. Initially, my job entailed the care and maintenance of the objects in the collection with a few other tasks as assigned. Of course, the arrival of the […]

Breaking Down the Barriers to Data Conversion

  • LINCS Project
  • September 17, 2021
Mapping Memory Manager logo

— Devon Hayley Farrell, LINCS metadata co-op — If there’s one thing I have learned during my library, archival, and information graduate studies, it is that information institutions are adverse to change. The archival profession progresses at a glacial pace. This is juxtaposed with the leaps and bounds made in information technology over the past […]