Open data’s role in transforming our bibliographic framework

"There’s another very important driver not explicitly mentioned in the announcement: the rise of open library data. More and more bibliographic and other library-related data is now freely available and reusable online, and it enables all kinds of improvements in resource discovery. I’ve previously discussed how open data for Library of Congress Subject Headings and Hathi Trust online books allows me to manage a catalog of over a million books, create rich subject browsing interfaces, and improve the quality of library catalogs at Penn. OCLC has also compiled data on millions of authors in VIAF, and now makes it available as open data....And there’s more big news from OCLC. At last month’s Global Council meeting, Karen Calhoun gave a presentation saying they were considering releasing WorldCat data under an open license...."