— Jingyi Long, LINCS undergraduate research assistant — In my first meeting this summer as a data science research assistant, we each followed our personal introductions with declarations of our favourite ice cream flavours. Mine was and continues to be Häagen Dazs’ Strawberry Cheesecake ice cream, and I was pleasantly surprised to learn someone else […]

— Ze Xi (Jessica) Ye, LINCS metadata co-op — During my graduate courses in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, I gained a high-level understanding of Linked Open Data (LOD) and the CIDOC CRM ontology, a theoretical and practical tool for information integration in the field of cultural heritage. Because I am an Archives […]

— Emily McKibbon, LINCS metadata co-op — My first job in the museums field was in 2008, right at the height of the Great Recession. The digitization team I joined had just lost roughly a quarter of their staff in a series of buyouts and layoffs, and the mood was grim. We were tasked with […]

— Sam Peacock, LINCS undergraduate research assistant — When I began working with ontologies at the LINCS project this summer, my colleagues and I quickly found ourselves asking exasperating questions like “How do you explain the visual concepts present in an artwork to a database?” Even more broad (and maybe ultimately unanswerable) questions like “what is […]

— Sarah Mousseau, LINCS undergraduate research assistant — In the summer of 2020, I was hired as a research assistant with the University of Guelph’s Bachinski/Chu Print Study Collection. Initially, my job entailed the care and maintenance of the objects in the collection with a few other tasks as assigned. Of course, the arrival of the […]

— Devon Hayley Farrell, LINCS metadata co-op — If there’s one thing I have learned during my library, archival, and information graduate studies, it is that information institutions are adverse to change. The archival profession progresses at a glacial pace. This is juxtaposed with the leaps and bounds made in information technology over the past […]

— Thomas Smith, LINCS undergraduate research assistant — Over the many years I have worked on the LINCS project, I encountered many new terms. Sitting at my desk in THINC Lab, I used to hear people discussing something called ontologies. I would listen in to meetings about the creation of the CWRC ontology, and eventually I was […]