Nearly all German National Library metadata now available under CC0 license

Since July 2012 the German National Library (DNB) has been releasing more and more of their title data as Linked Open Data under a Creative Commons Zero license, making it possible for everyone to use and re-use this information without any restrictions. As part of their strategy the DNB introduced a moving wall, through which more data becomes available as Linked Open Data every year.

Starting from 1 January 2014, approximately 95% of all metadata of the DNB is under an open license. This includes all 10 million authority records, all 1.5 million records for digital publications, all 500.000 records for serials and about 8 million further title records. The only data which is not yet freely available is the metadata of printed monographs, cards, music sheets and music recordings from the years 2013 and 2014 in MARC 21 and an extended csv-title-pro format. In all other formats, including RDF and CSV, the complete metadata is already open. The DNB plans to publish the complete metadata sets under the CC0 license on 1 July 2015.

Information on how to obtain the data can be found on this page. A background interview with Lars Svensson, Advisor for Knowledge Networking at the DNB, about what this move has meant for the library is available from this earlier blog post.