I love the CERN library’s message of “Raw bibliographic book data available now!”, framed
1989: TimBL invented WWW at CERN
2009: TimBL calls for “Open Data Now” at TED

CERN is the latest library to share their book data, as CERN emerging technologies librarian Patrick Danowski announced on twitter. The Open Book Data Project is further described on their website and in a youtube video (below) purpose-made for the occasion. The data is dual-licensed as CC0 and PDDL.

This isn’t the first time that library data has been shared with a splash.

After speaking at Code4Lib 2008 (my first Code4Lib conference), Brewster Kahle was presented with MARC records from the Oregon Summit consortium.

In 2007, a number of Library of Congress records were deposited in connection with
Scriblio Open Source Endeca, a faceted catalog Casey Bisson Durfee described at Code4Lib2007. Scriblio It has gone through several incarnations; the open source Kochief project is the latest.

Further, as Jonathan Gorman and I were discussing in #code4lib earlier this week, there are several collections of MARC records and more donated to Open Library hosted at the Internet Archive. A few are misclassified so also consider keyword searches (‘MARC’ and ‘MARC libraries’) if you’re trying to find all the MARC records that archive.org has.

Linked data in libraries is coming along more slowly; fruit, perhaps, for another post.

Where do you look for bibliographic records? Feel free to leave tips in the comments!

Updated 2010-04-14, with thanks to Dan Scott for corrections!