— 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 […]

— 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 […]

— Sam Peacock, LINCS undergraduate research assistant — When I began working with ontologies at the LINCS project this summer, my colleagues and I quickly found ourselves asking exasperating questions like “How do you explain the visual concepts present in an artwork to a database?” Even more broad (and maybe ultimately unanswerable) questions like “what is […]

— 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 […]

— 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 […]

— Thomas Smith, LINCS undergraduate research assistant — Over the many years I have worked on the LINCS project, I encountered many new terms. Sitting at my desk in THINC Lab, I used to hear people discussing something called ontologies. I would listen in to meetings about the creation of the CWRC ontology, and eventually I was […]