Finnish National Bibliography released as Open Data
The Fennica National Bibliography is a database of Finnish publications maintained by the National Library of Finland. Fennica has been published as open data using the CC0 license, which allows free use for any purpose, for example in applications and data visualizations.
The Finnish national bibliography contains metadata about:
- Finnish books since 1488
- serial material, including journals since 1771
- maps since the 1540’s
- audiovisual materials
- digitized old collections
- topical index of the ephemera collection
- index of thematic web harvests since 2008
- advance notices of upcoming publications from publishers
- a selection of electronic books since 2008
The service contains information about one million Finnish works. You can browse the data with a user interface at http://data.nationallibrary.fi. Every work, person, organization, place, and subject is shown as a page, which are linked to each other with relationships. For example, a work usually has an author (a person) and an instance (an edition or a version) of a work usually has a publisher (an organization). There are circa 2 million of such pages in the service.
The linked data can be accessed in several ways. Works and other resources have been assigned identifiers (URIs) that provide machine readable data in e.g. JSON-LD, Turtle, and RDF/XML formats. SPARQL and Linked Data Fragments query APIs are also available for making broader queries. The full data set can be downloaded both as RDF and as the original MARC records.
We are also publishing several other databases and APIs of the National Library. You can find more information in the Data Catalog: https://www.kiwi.fi/display/Datacatalog
The mission of the National Library is to collect printed and recorded materials intended for distribution in Finland, to make them accessible to the public along with metadata about them, as well as to preserve them for the future generations. Open data creates opportunities for new research and supports citizen science. The National Library hopes to see new use cases for its data repositories. We have previously opened thesauri, ontologies and corporate names produced by the National Library. The licences also allow these materials to be used in commercial settings. The name authority files describing Finnish authors will be opened later, since we must take into account possible privacy and data protection issues involved in publishing them.
For more information, contact:
Information Systems Manager Nina Hyvönen, nina.hyvonen(a)helsinki.fi
Information Systems Specialist Osma Suominen, osma.suominen(a)helsinki.fi