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.

“By
instituting a policy of open metadata, the Harvard Library has
expressed its appreciation for the great potential that library
metadata has for innovative uses. The two metadata releases today
are prime examples,” said Stuart
Shieber, Library Board Member, Director of the Office
for Scholarly Communication and Professor of Computer Science at
Harvard.

John
Palfrey, Chair of the DPLA, said, “With this major contribution,
developers will be able to start experimenting with building
innovative applications that put to use the vital national resource
that consists of our local public and research libraries, museums,
archives and cultural collections.” He added that he hoped that
this would encourage other institutions to make their own collection metadata
publicly available.

The
records consist of information describing works—including creator,
title, publisher, date, language, and subject headings—as well as
other descriptors usually invisible to end users, such as the
equalization system used in a recording. Harvard’s Kennedy noted,
“The accessibility of the entire set of data for each item will, we
hope, spur imaginative uses that will find new value in what
libraries know.”