An article out of OpenGLAM reports, “Last week, the National Library of the Netherlands (KB) has made two large datasets available. The images, texts and metadata are now available through a dedicated API. Ten thousand Dutch eighteenth century books and almost two centuries of parliament documents are the first datasets in the new service of the KB: dataservices. In the next months, more datasets will be released, accompanied with comprehensive documentation how the data can and cannot be used. They invite the user and developers to find appropiate ways of reusing the data and give a new purpose to it.” Read more

The Economist has published an article, Bit Rot, regarding how the world is losing its ability to reconstruct history. The article states, “Picture yourself as a historian in 2035, trying to make sense of this year’s American election campaign. Many of the websites and blogs now abuzz with news and comment will have long since perished. Data stored electronically decays. Many floppy disks from the early digital age are already unreadable. If you are lucky, copies of campaign material, and of e-mails and other materials (including declassified official documents), will be available in public libraries. But will you be able to read them? Already, NASA has lost data from some of its earliest missions to the moon because the machines used to read the tapes were scrapped and cannot be rebuilt.” Read more

Gary D. Price has posted a new four-part video on InfoDocket, Semantic Technologies & Linked Data for Digitized Collections. The video was taken of a presentation given March 7, 2012, at a meeting of the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) Digitization Special Interest Group. The video is described thus: “How can librarians and archivists keep up with the soaring demand for content findability within their growing digital collections? This is something many search engines have not yet caught up with.” Read more

Richard Wallis recently commented on the incorporation of linked data and linked open data at libraries. Wallis writes, “Last summer, it was great to play a small part in the release of the British National Bibliography as Linked Data by the British Library – openly available via Talis and their Kasabi Platform.  Late last year the Library of Congress announced that Linked Data and RDF was on their roadmap, soon followed by the report and plan from Stanford University with Linked Data at its core.  More recently still, Europeana have opened up access to a large amount of cultural heritage, including library, data. Even more recently I note that OCLC, at their EMEA Regional Council Meeting in Birmingham this week, see Linked Data as an important topic on the library agenda.” Read more

In an article about CC0, the Creative Commons option that allows content creators and owners to dedicate works to the public domain, Jane Park reports, “CC0 has been getting lots of love in the last couple months in the realm of data, specifically GLAM data (GLAM as in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums). The national libraries of Spain and Germany have released their bibliographic data using the CC0 public domain dedication tool. For those of you who don’t know what that means, it means that the libraries have waived all copyrights to the extent possible in their jurisdictions, placing the data effectively into the public domain. What’s more, the data is available as linked open data, which means that the data sets are available as RDF (Resource Description Framework) on the web, enabling the data to be linked with other data from different sources.” Read more

Boris Villazon-Terrazas reports that the Ontology Engineering Group has announced the launch of datos.bne.es, “an open initiative aimed at enriching the Web of Data with library data from the Spanish National Library. The SPARQL endpoint is available here. The RDF generation from MARC 21 records was done using our tool MARiMbA, which allows non-technical users to work on the mappings from MARC21 metadata to RDF using different RDFS/OWL vocabularies.” Read more

Karen Coyle recently commented on the growing number of RDF and linked data projects in the field of library data. Coyle writes, “With the newly developed enthusiasm for RDF as the basis for library bibliographic data we are seeing a number of efforts to transform library data into this modern, web-friendly format. This is a positive development in many ways, but we need to be careful to make this transition cleanly without bringing along baggage from our past. Recent efforts have focused on translating library record formats into RDF with the result that we now have: ISBD in RDF, FRBR in RDF, [and] RDA in RDF, and will soon have MODS in RDF.” Read more

The W3C is set to publish a report this month on the topic of library linked data. The article reports, “The number of influential libraries publishing their metadata onto the web as linked open data, which is the heart of the Semantic Web, is growing at a dizzying rate. To further this trend, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a major nonlibrary organization that supports the technologies that undergird the Semantic Web (or the Web of Data), will release a new report.” Read more

Eric Hellman recently shared his insights on library data beyond the ‘like’ button. Hellman writes, “Earlier this month, I attended a lecture at the New York Public Library. The topic was Linked Open Data, and the speaker was Jon Voss, who’s been applying this technology to historical maps. It was striking to see how many people from many institutions turned out, and how enthusiastically Jon’s talk was received. The interest in Linked Data was similarly high at the American Library Association Meeting in New Orleans, where my session (presented with Ross Singer of Talis) was only one of several Linked Data sessions that packed meeting rooms and forced attendees to listen from hallways.” Read more

A quirky new article likens search engines to humongous babies. The article states, “You can’t expect it to understand complicated things. You would never try to teach language to a human baby by reading it Nietzsche, and you shouldn’t expect a baby google to learn bibliographic data by feeding it MARC (or RDA or METS or MODS, or even ONIX). When a baby says ‘goo-goo’ to you, you don’t criticize its misuse of the subjunctive. You say ‘goo-goo’ back. When Google tells you that that it wants to hear ‘schema.org’ microdata, you don’t try to tell it about the first indicator of the 856 ‡u subfield. You give it schema.org microdata, no matter how babyish that seems.” Read more