Beyond databases: Linked open data for bookbinding descriptions

Historical methodologies rely on evidence in order to support hypotheses. Bookbindings can play a key role in supporting hypotheses because they offer a plethora of physical evidence of materials and techniques. Publishing this evidence online may showcase a specific collection but it does not make the records re-usable by researchers without time-consuming work. In this paper I am looking into recent developments of the semantic web technologies which refer to re-usable data as “Linked Open Data” and examine how it is possible to employ these technologies in historical bookbinding research.