Stockholm, 21 September 2011

(by Ton Zijlstra)

Librisbloggen, the weblog of the Swedish National Library, announces that the Swedish National Bibliography and authority files are now available under a Creative Commons 0, public domain dedication, license. This is the implementation of a decision taken shortly before the summer.

"We see the investment in Open Data as a strategic one and one that is needed to ensure long term sustainability and competition when it comes to the services needed by libraries and their users, as well as the right to control over their collections"

The data is available in two ways, as Atom feeds and through the OAI-PMH protocol.

According to the blogposting the long term goal is to release the entire database of the Swedish Union Catalogue (of which the mentioned data is part) under an open license. The data that is now brought under the CC0 license is also linked to external sources such as Wikipedia, DBpedia and LC Authorities.