Bridging the Gap: Using Linked Data to Improve Discoverability and Diversity in Digital Collections.

The year of COVID-19, 2020, brought unique experiences to everyone in their daily as well as their professional life. Facing many challenges of division in all aspects (social distancing, political and social divisions, remote work environments), University of South Florida Libraries took the lead in exploring how to overcome these various separations by providing access to its high-quality information sources to its local community and beyond. This paper shares the insights of using Linked Data technology to provide easy access to digital cultural heritage collections not only for the scholarly communities but also for those underrepresented user groups. The authors present the challenges at this special time of the history, discuss the possible solutions, and propose future work to further the effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]