Harvard Library releases 12M bibliographic records under CC0

Harvard Library yesterday announced the release of 12 Million bibliographic record into the public domain using CC0.

From the announcement:

“The Harvard Library announced it is making more than 12 million catalog records from Harvard’s 73 libraries publicly available.

The records contain bibliographic information about books, videos, audio recordings, images, manuscripts, maps, and more. The Harvard Library is making these records available in accordance with its Open Metadata Policy and under a Creative Commons 0 (CC0) public domain license. In addition, the Harvard Library announced its open distribution of metadata from its Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) scholarly article repository under a similar CC0 license.

‘The Harvard Library is committed to collaboration and open access. We hope this contribution is one of many steps toward sharing the vital cultural knowledge held by libraries with all,’ said Mary Lee Kennedy, Senior Associate Provost for the Harvard Library.

The catalog records are available for bulk download from Harvard, and are available for programmatic access by software applications via API’s at the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). The records are in the standard MARC21 format.”

That’s great news. There already is an entry for this dataset at the Data Hub.

See also David Weinberger’s post on the data release.