A new article reports that the British Library has announced “a significant contribution to the development, application, and sharing of bibliographic data using Linked Data techniques and technologies, with a preview of a new approach to publishing the British National Bibliography. Chief Executive Dame Lynne Brindley announced the initiative in her Keynote at Linked Data and Libraries 2011, hosted by Talis at the British Library (BL) in London.”

The article continues, “The Metadata Services Team at BL have been working with Tim Hodson, and other Talis consultants, over the last few months to apply Linked Data modelling practices to bibliographic resources. The British National Bibliography (BNB) of 2.8 million titles was used as the basis for this
work. This differs from their first bibliographic Linked Data publishing initiative in that they did not set out solely to encode their collection of Marc records into RDF/XML, as they and several other libraries have done previously.”

It goes on, “Instead, building on training and workshops with the Talis team, they set out to model ‘things of interest’, such as people, places and events, related to a book you might hold in your hand. Although they were constantly aware of the value of the BNB data, they did not want to be constrained by the format and practices that went into its creation over many years.”

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