German National Library goes LOD & publishes National Bibliography

Good news from Germany. The German National Library

1. changed its licensing regime for Linked Data to CC0 which makes the data open according to the open definition,
2. has begun to publish the German national bibliography as Linked Open Data.

For background see the email (German) announcing this step. There it says (my translation):

“In 2010 the German National Library (DNB) started publishing authority data as Linked Data. The existing Linked Data service of the DNB is now extended with title data. In this context the licence for linked data is shifted to “Creative Commons Zero.

Until now, the majority of DNB title data is implemented as well as periodicals and series – the music data and holdings of the German Exiles Archive are missing. From now on, the RDF/XML representation of a title record is available in the DNB portal via a link. This is expressly an experimental service which will be extended and refined continually. More detailed informations about modelling questions and the general approach can be fund in the updated documentation.”

The English documentation (PDF) hasn’t been updated yet and only describes the GND authority data. On the wiki page about the LOD service it says: “Examples and further information about FTP-downloads will come soon.” An entry on the Data Hub has already been made for the data.