How to engineer the unexpected

From ABC-RN's Future Tense program of 20 October 2015:

Serendipity, generally thought of as accidental good fortune, has long been a staple of popular science. The notion of fortuitous discovery still has strong appeal, but could it encourage innovation? Antony Funnell meets researchers who not only believe in serendipity, but are actively trying to engineer it.

"...search has become so effective over the past decade that it has completely overshadowed the value of browsing and exploring: 'I think there really is a bias towards supporting search,' he says, 'and it has meant that supporting serendipity when finding information has been relatively neglected.'"

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/creating-innovation-through-serendipity/6868960

Burn it all down

Hugh Rundle says 'The age of library technicians and cataloguers is over, and shiny new librarians can’t solve our problems if they’re not supported by bold leaders and managers. What we need now is metadata managers'. hughrundle.net | 28 May 2015

Linked Data for Libraries Project

"Welcome to the Linked Data for Libraries (LD4L) project. The project is a collaboration of the Cornell University Library, the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, and the Stanford University Libraries, and is funded by a nearly $1 million two-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The goal of the project is to create a Scholarly Resource Semantic Information Store (SRSIS) model that works both within individual institutions and through a coordinated, extensible network of Linked Open Data to capture the intellectual value that librarians and other domain experts and scholars add to information resources when they describe, annotate, organize, select, and use those resources, together with the social value evident from patterns of usage."
Aims to connect entities in descriptive metadata: People, Organisations, Places, Subjects, Events, Works, and Datasets.

The Linked Data for Libraries (LD4L) Project: a Progress Report: http://www.cni.org/pbs/the-linked-data-for-libraries-ld4l-project-a-progress-report/

Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names Released as Linked Open Data

The Getty Research Institute has released the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN)® as Linked Open Data.
Following the release of the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT)® in February, TGN is now the second of the four Getty vocabularies to be made entirely free to download, share, and modify. Both data sets are available for download at vocab.getty.edu under an Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC BY 1.0).
The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names is a resource of over 2,000,000 names of current and historical places, including cities, archaeological sites, nations, and physical features. It focuses mainly on places relevant to art, architecture, archaeology, art conservation, and related fields. 
See more at: http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/getty-thesaurus-of-geographic-names-released-as-linked-open-data/#sthash.ljxHoaeP.6fSfRfkI.dpuf