{"id":4045,"date":"2012-04-25T18:29:06","date_gmt":"2012-04-25T18:29:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/?p=4045"},"modified":"2012-04-27T15:10:35","modified_gmt":"2012-04-27T15:10:35","slug":"harvard-releases-12-million-library-records","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/2012\/04\/25\/harvard-releases-12-million-library-records\/","title":{"rendered":"Harvard Releases 12 Million Library Records"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today, Harvard announced that it would make 12 million catalog records&mdash;nearly all of the records from its 73 libraries&mdash;publicly available.\u00a0 The records include bibliographic information about items from a diverse set of media, and The Harvard Library has made all this metadata available under a <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/about\/cc0\">Creative Commons 0 (CC0) public domain license<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;With this major contribution, developers will be able to start experimenting with building innovative applications that put to use the vital national resource that consists of our local public and research libraries, museums, archives and cultural collections,&#8221; said DPLA Steering Committee Chair John Palfrey in the official Harvard Library <a href=\"http:\/\/isites.harvard.edu\/icb\/icb.do?keyword=k77982&amp;pageid=icb.page498373\">press release<\/a>.\u00a0 He also stated that he hoped the Harvard release would set a precedent for other institutions&#8217; collections.<\/p>\n<p>The records are available for <a href=\"http:\/\/openmetadata.lib.harvard.edu\/bibdata\">bulk download<\/a> in MARC21 format.\u00a0 The DPLA Tech Dev team has incorporated the records into its database and is making them available through an API.\u00a0 API documentation from the team is available <a href=\"http:\/\/dp.la\/dev\/wiki\/Item_API\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.\u00a0 The API is in early alpha, so any and all feedback is welcome as the team continues to refine.\u00a0 The team celebrated the metadata release in their post, <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/dplatechdev\/2012\/04\/24\/going-live-with-harvards-catalog\/\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Going live with Harvard&#8217;s catalog.&#8221;<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Amazing work in the digital humanities could be done with the metadata.\u00a0 The New York Times&#8217; Bits Blog <a href=\"http:\/\/bits.blogs.nytimes.com\/2012\/04\/24\/harvard-releases-big-data-for-books\/\">discussed the release<\/a> with David Weinberger: &#8220;&#8216;This is Big Data for books,&#8217; said David Weinberger, co-director of Harvard\u2019s Library Lab. &#8216;There might be 100 different attributes for a single object.&#8217; At a one-day test run with 15 hackers working with information on 600,000 items, he said, people created things like visual timelines of when ideas became broadly published, maps showing locations of different items, and a &#8216;virtual stack&#8217; of related volumes garnered from various locations.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Though metadata is distinct from the content it describes, this sort of data is essential to the growing DPLA and is a vital step towards the project&#8217;s realization.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Harvard Library has made 12 million library records available for programmatic access via the DPLA API.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3793,"featured_media":141,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[923,43882],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-dpla-updates"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/files\/2011\/08\/content_4a.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3793"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4045"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4045\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4064,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4045\/revisions\/4064"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}