Swedish National Bibliography and authority data released with open license
september 21, 2011 Martin
Before the summer the Swedish national librarian, Gunnar Sahlin, signed an agreement effectively releasing the Swedish National Bibliography and authority files into the public domain. We are now pleased to announce the general availability of these records (see below for details). We see the investment in Open Data as a strategic one and one that is needed to ensure long term sustainability and competition when it comes to the services needed by libraries and their users as well as the right to control over their collections. The license chosen is CC0 which waives any rights the National Library have over the National Bibliography and the authority data.
There are two ways to access the data, as Atom feeds with references to the records and using (a somewhat rudimentary implementation of) the OAI-PMH protocol. See the table below.
| National Bibliography | feed, OAI-PMH |
| Authority Data | feed, OAI-PMH |
| Authority Data (persons) | feed |
| Authority Data (subjects) | feed |
| Authority Data (organisations) | feed |
The National Bibliography and authority data is part of Libris, the Swedish Union Catalogue, and the long term goal is to release the whole database under an open license, though this will undoubtedly take some time. The data contains links to Wikipedia, DBPedia, LC Authorities (names and subjects) and VIAF. VIAF has also been used to find some of these links. These channels are provided as a complement to the Linked Data implementation.
This is a work in progress and any comments are welcome. Send your comments to martin.malmsten@kb.se or libris@kb.se.
I genuinely hope that this can be imported directly into openlibrary.org.
I see no reason why that could not be done.
We are celebrating this with a mass-gathering in Gothenburg in your honour tomorrow. Thank you Libris and the Royal Library.
I am so there for the mass gathering! This truly is a cause for celebration. I am happy to see this finally happening!
Well done! \o/
Yay!
Congrats!
Great news!
Good on ya! Much librarylove from Finland, where our organizations are nowhere near these steps. Keep it up!
How will this decision effect the possiblities for a global cooperation through OCLC? Will we be
locked out?
Jan
Jan, we definitely hope it will affect the possibilities for global cooperation in the sense that more libraries will open up their catalogues.
Any entity, be it corporate or not, is free to load the data so I do not see how it could affect any relationship with OCLC.
[...] jämförelse på sin sajt. CC0 används redan idag av många institutioner, däribland svenska Kungliga biblioteket och [...]
[...] [...]
[...] basic metadata as CC0. This follows the trends at libraries such as the British Library and the National Library of Sweden (the National Library of France, meanwhile, has an open licence which equates to [...]