What happens if you publish the National Bibliography under a CC0 license? – Experiences of the German National Library (DNB)

Abstract

Since 1 July 2015 all bibliographic data of the German National Library and the authority data of the Integrated Authority File (GND) are provided free of charge and can be freely re-used under "Creative Commons Zero" (CC0 1.0) terms. This includes about 11 million authority records and over 14 million bibliographic records that can be downloaded via different online interfaces or APIs. The data can be obtained via online interfaces (Data Shop, SRU or OAI-PMH interface etc.) after an initial registration and authorization (registration free of charge). The basic procedure for users to obtain metadata from the German National Library is for them to download the data themselves in standard formats via online interfaces. Provision charges will be applied by the German National Library for active provision of data via FTP or WWW server which are not included in the basic service. This change in the business model was made in order to move customers from individual data provision to automated interfaces and allow them to set their own filters and update preferences. Since this change and the change to a CC0 license, the number of new registrations per month to get access via the SRU or OAI interface has quadrupled. The proportion of foreign users is increasing, however mostly from the German speaking countries Switzerland and Austria. In addition already existing customers who used to apply the simple formats like DNB Casual (oai_dc) or RDFxml that were always free of charge changed to the format MARC21-XML. These customers are primarily major suppliers of software that now provide their customers the ability to access the data of the German National Library. Among the new customers are also university libraries, smaller municipal and public libraries and software vendors. Going forward, we expect that this trend will continue. The paper will explain the decision to change to a CC0 license, the organizational and structural changes that had to be made and the experiences made in the first year.