ABSTRACT. The introduction in 2001 of the Open Archives InitiativeProtocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) increased interest in and awareness of metadata quality issues relevant to digital library interoperability and the use of harvested metadata to build "union catalogs" Amy S. Jackson (E-mail: amyjacks@uiuc.edu

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Purpose Early Modern emblem books are primary sources for scholars studying the European Renaissance. Linked Open Data (LOD) is an approach for organizing and modeling information in a data-centric manner compatible with the emerging Semantic Web. The purpose of this paper is to examine ways in which LOD methods can be applied to facilitate emblem resource discovery, better reveal the structure and connectedness of digitized emblem resources, and enhance scholar interactions with digitized emblem resources. Design/methodology/approach This research encompasses an analysis of the existing XML-based Spine (emblem-specific) metadata schema; the design of a new, domain-specific, Resource Description Framework compatible ontology; the mapping and transformation of metadata from Spine to both the new ontology and (separately) to the pre-existing Schema.org ontology; and the (experimental) modification of the Emblematica Online portal as a proof of concept to illustrate enhancements supported by LOD. Findings LOD is viable as an approach for facilitating discovery and enhancing the value to scholars of digitized emblem books; however, metadata must first be enriched with additional uniform resource identifiers and the workflow upgrades required to normalize and transform existing emblem metadata are substantial and still to be fully worked out. Practical implications The research described demonstrates the feasibility of transforming existing, special collections metadata to LOD. Although considerable work and further study will be required, preliminary findings suggest potential benefits of LOD for both users and libraries. Originality/value This research is unique in the context of emblem studies and adds to the emerging body of work examining the application of LOD best practices to library special collections.

When many collections are brought together in a federation or aggregation, the attributes of the original collections can become difficult to discern. Collection-level metadata has the potential to provide important context about the purpose and features of individual collections, but the qualitative aspects of collections are difficult to describe in a systematic way. This paper reports on a content analysis of collection records in the Digital Collections and Content (DCC) aggregation, conducted to analyze the kinds of substantive and purposeful information represented across 202 cultural heritage collections. We found that the free-text Description field often provides more accurate and complete representation of subjects and object types than the specified fields; it consistently represents properties such as uniqueness, importance, comprehensiveness, provenance, and creator of items in digital collection, and other vital contextual information about the intentions of collectors and the value of collections for scholarly users. The results show that free-text collection metadata can be both concise and semantically rich, and can provide a valuable source of data for enhancing and customizing controlled vocabularies.

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