Primary Sources as Linked Data: Exploring Motives Across the Sciences and Social Sciences

ABSTRACT While long recognized in the humanities, there is growing recognition in the sciences and social sciences that primary sources—as diverse as manuscripts, photographs, cultural belongings, and specimens—hold vast data about scientific and human knowledge for use in scholarship, community research, and global knowledge. Yet, data embedded in these sources are largely disconnected from the systems of discovery, access, and structured data that support reuse and insights across globally dispersed repositories. In this paper, we share select findings of a systematic review to explore the use of primary sources, and the data embedded in them, via linked data across the sciences and social sciences. Our results confirm the use of a variety of primary source data across diverse disciplines, particularly those requiring longitudinal studies and data integration from diverse repositories and contexts. We highlight how linked data are understood to: connect collections to communities; support highly granular credit, attribution, and assessment of impact; and interrelate diverse sources of knowledge. While these results suggest the value of linked data for the specific research needs of anthropology, the effectiveness of linked data in achieving these objectives and the suitability of this approach for a diversity of institutions and communities need further study.