I recently joined the Boston College Libraries, as their Senior Digital Scholarship Librarian and one of the first things I worked on with my colleague, Elliot Brandow, was a website for our Digital Scholarship group. {Sidenote: We wrote a short blurb on how we built the site.} We’ve had several discussions around Linked Open Data and potential projects that we may wish to initiate in the future, but after a recent visit from Jeff Penka and John Richardson of Zepheira, and Dan Specht of Atlas Systems and their presentation about BibFrame and Linked Open Data, I started to consider what we could do to ensure that our digital presence and the metadata we present about ourselves and work is controlled by us and indexed to generate better search listings based on the properties or relationships we identify (i.e. description, URL, author), which in turn will make us more visible on the Web. When we talk about or teach workshops about how best to create and control our digital presence, we should also discuss the importance of creating metadata and structured data markup to help control how our digital presence is searched, shared, and viewed on the Web.
If you have your own website or digital project, then you already have meta tags in the <head> section where metadata about your site, such as keywords, authors, or title, is located. Adding structured data markup (i.e. microdata, microformats, RDFa) will enable search engines to more accurately parse your website, index it, and make it more visible on the Web. One of the simpler things that you can do immediately is to add basic metadata using the Open Graph protocol, which will turn your web pages into graph objects. Websites, such as the The New York Times, DPLA, and New York Public Library are using the Open Graph protocol to provide their own metadata about their organization and influence the performance of their sites via social media. For example, if you share an article or a link to a website in your Facebook status, you would type in http://www.nytimes.com/, which will then pull in the RDFa metadata from The New York Times’ website. The metadata you see in the status update is pulled in directly from the website’s RDFa.
The New York Times in Facebook status
You can see that the URL, title, description, and image generated in the status update matches the metadata below:
The New York Times RDFa
In order to view RDFa triples in the web pages you are visiting, you can install the Green Turtle RDFa extension for Chrome browsers. When you visit a web page using triples, you’ll see a little green turtle in the address bar and you can then view the turtle and graph for that page. I went ahead and installed the Green Turtle RDFa extension in my Chrome browser and began checking websites to see if they had RDF triples. The website we created for our Digital Scholarship group did not have any structured data markup, so I went ahead and created basic metadata based on the Open Graph protocol, using the following properties:
og:title:og:type:og:image:og:url:og:description:
I then put the metadata into the index.html file of our website and the RDFa extension was able to sense that there were triples on our site:
RDFa turtle
It will take some time for Google to index your site after you make changes, however you will now have control over the metadata your site pushes out when it is being pulled in by social media sites or queried by users. You can submit additional information and submit your pages to Google for indexing using Google Webmaster’s Tools, which may optimize the search presence of your site. If you have a hosted site or platform, such as WordPress.org, you can install an Open Graph protocol plugin, which automatically renders metadata for the posts and pages you create. If you are using the Omeka platform for digital projects, you can add Open Graph protocol metadata in your header.php file, which is located in the common folder of your current theme.
