More library-related open data!

You may have heard that lcsh.info – which explored how Library of Congress Subject Headings could be represented as a Semantic Web application – was closed down last month.

The good news is that there are now two new projects publishing library-related open data:

• http://ckan.net/package/read/iconclass
• http://ckan.net/package/read/hud-library-usagedata

The first, ICONCLASS, is “an experimental service that makes the ICONCLASS Iconographic Classification system available as linked-data using the SKOS vocabulary”.

The second, from the University of Huddersfield Library, publishes circulation and recommendation data under both CC0 and the PDDL. Dave Pattern writes:

In total, there’s data for over 80,000 titles derived from a pool of just under 3 million circulation transactions spanning a 13 year period.

Data is comprised of two parts:

1. Circulation Data. This breaks down the loans by year, by academic school, and by individual academic courses. This data will primarily be of interest to other academic libraries. UK academic libraries may be able to directly compare borrowing by matching up their courses against ours (using the UCAS course codes).

2. Recommendation Data. This is the data which drives the “people who borrowed this, also borrowed…” suggestions in our OPAC. This data had previously been exposed as a web service with a non-commercial licence, but is now freely available for you to download. We’ve also included data about the number of times the suggested title was borrowed before, at the same time, or afterwards.

Related posts:

1. The Open Library and Versioned Data The Internet Archive has recently launched a beta version of The Open Library. A demo can be found here and the Open Library book can be read here. It is inspired by the idea of a “library that makes all...
2. Response to ‘The Future of Bibliographic Control’ draft from the Library of Congress A couple of weeks back we blogged about the ‘Future of Bibliographic Control’ draft report from a working group at the Library of Congress. Since then, we’ve submitted to the group a brief, collaboratively edited response to the draft and...
3. Biblios – “world’s largest database” of open bibliographic data goes beta! Biblios.net, “the world’s largest database of freely-licensed library records”, is now beta-testing. From their website: ‡biblios.net is a subscription-based, hosted version of the open-source ‡biblios metadata editor that we released earlier this year. In addition to the editor, ‡biblios.net includes...