The two German library networks BVB (BibliotheksVerbund Bayern = Library Network Bavaria) and KOBV (Kooperativer Bibliotheksverbund Berlin-Brandenburg = Cooperative Library Network Berlin-Brandenburg) have recently released 23 million records from their joint union catalogue under a CC0 license. The opening of Bavaria’s open data portal was taken as occasion for publishing this data.
MARC records and Linked Open Data
The data was released as MARC records (MARC XML) and also an experimental Linked Open Data service was launched at [http://lod.b3kat.de/] with full dumps of the RDF data made available for download:
- MARC XML: Example data, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
- RDF: see download links here.
The data was exported on November, 22th 2011 and updates can be harvested via an OAI-PMH interface from http://bvbr.bib-bvb.de:8991/aleph-cgi/oai/oai_opendata.pl?verb=ListRecords&set=OpenData&metadataPrefix=marc21.
So far, no entries for this data exist on the Data Hub. Anyone?
Is openness becoming the new normal in Germany?
With this initiative, there is now open data from four German library networks available, BVB and KOBV now being the first to having released their entire union catalogue. The North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Center (hbz) started in March 2010 with opening up data (see here) and in autumn 2010 libraries from the southwestern library network (SWB) followed (see here).
Hopefully this development will continue and libraries and related institutions will continue releasing open data, be it bibliographic data or other data produced by libraries.
