New, open and reusable BNE datasets are available

Within their strategy framework to promote the reuse of digital heritage, and with the support of Red.es, the Spanish National Library (BNE) has developed a specific data analysis, opening and publication work in the last year. The data are shared in open and reusable formats and following RISP (Reuse of Public Sector Information) policies and standards. As a result, 137 bibliographic and institutional data sets of great value, both for libraries and for researchers and reusers in general, are already available at datos.gob.es (and, as a consequence, at the European Data Portal).

In the case of bibliographic data, an effort has been made to transform the registers into open and accessible formats, aimed at non-expert public. In this way, data have been adapted to formats such as JSON, CSV, ODS, TXT or XML. This process has been applied, for the moment, to BNE Authorities Catalog (and subsets such as individuals, entities, subjects, etc.), Hispanic Digital Library (and subsets such as types of materials and outstanding collections), Archive Collections of Spanish website and Directory of Spanish Libraries and Newspapers.

In addition to improving and periodically updating the aforementioned sets, the Bibliographic Catalog, the Spanish Bibliography and other sets of interest for citizenship will soon be published, following the same methodology.

This activity is open to collaboration, as a starting point to build a useful open data service for research and re-use community, and for general public. In this line, experimentation activities related to these data sets will be convened shortly, in collaboration with interest groups, researchers and open data reusing communities, capable of exploiting and finding new uses for these data in fields such as natural language processing, artificial intelligence, academic research or software development.

Since 2015, with the publication of BNE Plan to promote the reuse of public information (RISP Plan) and the inclusion of this line in its Strategic Plan 2015-2020, the Spanish National Library has decidedly go for making the information they produce available to society, in order to contribute to new ways of creating, editing, disseminating and accessing culture and knowledge. Some examples are ChefBNE, Juego filarmónico or the new version of datos.bne.es, a linked data portal.

The agreement signed with Red.es in 2016 allowed the articulation and development of this strategic line. One of its objectives is to promote and provide the means for a correct reuse of the information generated by BNE.