Facilitator(s)
Trond Aalberg (@Trond)
Abstract
The future of library data is entity-based, and the new generation of librarians must be trained in the mindset, formats, vocabularies and identifiers that will be the core of library data in the future. Unfortunately, in education we lack convenient and pedagogically oriented tools that students can use to develop knowledge, reflect over and build experience of bibliographic entities. For this purpose, we have developed the EntEdit tool which is an entity-oriented editor where students can create, assign attributes and establish relationships between entities using a convenient and easy to use application. Students can easily explore the structures they establish using visualizations and inspect how data will behave in bibliographic search. Data can be downloaded in the turtle RDF format e.g. for sharing work or submitting solutions to an educational assignment. Furthermore, the system supports logging of user actions which can be used to gather information about how students build their collection of entities.
The system consists of a web application frontend, uses the GraphDB triple store as backend, and utilizes a subset of the RDA registry vocabulary for class and property types. It can be installed locally by students and others as a Docker compose container without the need of any licence, or it can be set up as a common web service for those that want a self-hosted solution. The system is developed with the assistance of Anthropic’s Claude agentic coding environment. It is available on GitHub (GitHub - trondaal/EntEdit: Application for cataloguing bibliographic entities, intended for learning. · GitHub) under the CC BY-NC 4.0 licence and premade docker container.
In this tutorial, we plan for an introductory presentation demonstrating and explaining the design rational and educational use of the application (30 min). Then we move on to an interactive session, where participants can install and run the system on their own computers, or try out using an online version (2 hours). Finally, we will engage the participants in a discussion on the opportunities and challenges of experience-based learning of entity-oriented metadata.