UCSB’s American Discography Project (APD) is pleased to announce that the
Discography of American Historical Recordings (DAHR) has enhanced its name
index using Linked Data. Thanks to funding from the Library of Congress
National Recording Preservation Board, ADP staff have used LC Name
Authority identifiers to link approximately 18,000 of our 60,000 unique
names in DAHR to their corresponding entries in the Library of Congress
Name Authority File. Through the networks of Linked Data, this allows DAHR
to join this web of linkages to other data sets. For an example of a new
detailed DAHR name entry, see the record for jazz musician Benny Carter
<https://adp.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/mastertalent/detail/103374/Carter_Benny>.


The Linked Data allows us to automatically pull in biographies and
photographs from Wikipedia and have outbound links to other public
databases for added context. As more streaming and downloadable audio is
added to DAHR, we hope this richer context will help users of the database
to make positive IDs of people for the purposes of research, teaching, and
cataloging, among other things. We have also created a DAHR URI to add back
to the web of Linked Data identifiers so that DAHR can be cited without
fear of obsolescence and can inter-operate with other data sets. More
information on our Linked Data project can be found here
<https://adp.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/resources/detail/443>.

In addition to the Library of Congress, we’d also like to thank our
partners at AVP for designing and executing the data harvest and our
database developer Properlysorted LLC.

We welcome feedback and suggestions, corrections, and the like.

David Seubert
Project Director, ADP
University of California, Santa Barbara