Cologne-based libraries and the Library Centre of Rhineland-Palatinate (LBZ), in cooperation with the North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Center (hbz), have reportedly become the first German libraries to adopt open access for bibliographic data. The institutions have published their catalogue data for free public use. The University and Public Library of Cologne (USB), the Library of the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, the University Library of the University of Applied Science of Cologne and the LBZ are participating in the move. The release of bibliographic data is projected to form a basis for linking that data with data from other domains in the Semantic Web.
The objective of the latest initiative is to provide free access to knowledge to everybody via the Internet. Until now, it was not possible to download library catalogues as a whole. The library of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has already published its data under a public domain licence in January. According to observers, cooperation and data exchange between libraries have been firmly established in the library world for more than 100 years. Freely supplying bibliographic data should not only further enhance cooperation among libraries but enable subsequent use by non-library institutions, they feel.
The North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Center has begun evaluating the possibilities to transform data from library catalogues in such a way that it can become a part of the emerging Semantic Web. The liberalisation of bibliographic data is seen to provide the legal background to perform this transformation in a cooperative, open and transparent way. Currently there are discussions with other member libraries of the hbz library network to publish their data.
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