The Harvard Library has announced that it is making more than 12 million catalogue records from Harvard’s 73 libraries publicly available.
The records contain bibliographic information about books, videos, audio recordings, images, manuscripts, maps, and more. The Harvard Library is making these records available in accordance with its Open Metadata Policy and under a Creative Commons 0 (CC0) public domain license. In addition, the Harvard Library announced its open distribution of metadata from its Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) scholarly article repository under a similar CC0 license.
The catalogue records are available for bulk download from Harvard, and are available for programmatic access by software applications via API's at the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). The records are in the standard MARC21 format.
The records consist of information describing works - including creator, title, publisher, date, language, and subject headings - as well as other descriptors usually invisible to end users, such as the equalisation system used in a recording.
