In January 2012 the German National Library (DNB) already started publishing the national bibliographc as linked data under a CC0 license. Today, the DNB announced that it also publishes the national bibliography up to the year 2011 as MARC data. The full announcement reads as follows (quick translation by myself):
“All of German National Library’s title data which are offered under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license for free use are now available gratis as MARC 21 records. In total, these are more than 11.5 Million title records.
Currently title data up to bibliography year 2011 is offered under a Creative Commons Zero license (CC0). For using the data a registration free of charge is necessary. Title data of the current and the previous year are subject to charge. The CC0 data package will be expanded by one bibliography year each first quarter of a year.
It is planned to provide free access under CC0 conditions to all data in all formats in mid-2015. The German National Library thus takes into account the growing need for freely available metadata.”
As the MARC data contains much more information than the linked data (because not all MARC fields are currently mapped to RDF) this is good news for anybody who is interested in getting all the information available in the national bibliography. As DNB still makes money with selling the national bibliography to libraries and other interested parties it won’t release all bibliographic data until the present day into the public domain. It’s good to see that there already exist plans to switch to a fully free model in 2015.
See also Lars Svensson: Licensing Library and Authority Data Under CC0: The DNB Experience (pdf).
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