[InetBib] CERN Library publishes its book catalog as Open Data

[Patrick Danowski <patrick.danowski@xxxxxx>]

Sehr geehrte Kolleginnen und Kollegen,

ich möchte Sie auf die folgende Information der CERN Library aufmerksam machen. 
Sollten die Daten für Sie in einem Kontext von Interesse sein würde ich mich 
über eine kurze Benachrichtigung sehr freuen.

Einen guten Start ins Wochenende

Patrick Danowski
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The CERN Library publishes its book catalog as Open Data


Librarians are in general very favourable to the principles of Open Access, but 
surprisingly few libraries have so far set free the data they produce 
themselves. As one of the first scientific libraries in the world, the CERN 
Library offers now the bibliographic book records, held in its library catalog, 
to be freely downloaded by any third party. The records are provided under the 
Public Domain Data License, a license that permits colleagues around the world 
to reuse and upgrade the data for any purpose. 

Jens Vigen, Head of the CERN Library, says: "Books should only be catalogued 
once. Currently the public purse pays for having the same book catalogued over 
and over again. Librarians should act as they preach: data sets created through 
public funding should be made freely available to anyone interested. Open 
Access is natural for us, here at CERN we believe in openness and reuse. There 
is a tremendous potential. By getting academic libraries worldwide involved in 
this movement, it will lead to a natural atmosphere of sharing and reusing 
bibliographic data in a rich landscape of so-called mash-up services, where 
most of the actors who will be involved, both among the users and the 
providers, will not even be library users or librarians. Our action is made in 
the spirit of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the 
Sciences and Humanities; bibliographic data belongs to the cultural 
heritage.All other signatories should align their policy accordingly." 

The data of CERN Library will be used by the Open Library Project to provide a 
webpage for every book and allow users to add content like table of contents, 
classifications and summaries. 

For massive reuse of data, the data will be provided soon by an open Z39.50, 
SRU and OAI interface via biblios.net, a repository of open bibliographic data. 

The whole dataset can be downloaded from
http://cern.ch/bookdata 

The press announcement is accompanied by a YouTube Video that can be found at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CSmieTXbsk 
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