National Library of Spain, plan on Re-use of Public Sector Information

Last March, the National Library of Spain (BNE) published its action plan to promote the re-use of public sector information (PSI): a sound commitment to make available to the whole Spanish society the data held by the institution. This plan meets the requirements set by Directive 2013/37/EU of 26 June 2013 -transposed into national legislation through Law 18/2015 - and includes, as a novelty, the outstanding value for society of the open access to information held by libraries, archives and museums.

The document -made by a group of professionals of different profiles at National Library - includes a roadmap for the re-use of PSI which BNE plans to carry out in the next years, and also establishes the procedure to implement its re-use services. Thus, the plan, available on the entity website and datos.gob.es, includes guidelines in the following areas:

• Identification and selection of reusable information.
• Procedures for dataset preparation.
• Conditions of open data re-use of National Library of Spain.
• Design and management of an online platform.
• Publication and maintenance of reusable data.
• Steps to assess and improve the quality of data re-use while boosting the data consume.

The National Library of Spain has already taken the first steps in the plan execution thanks to the creation of an online portal, datos.bne.es, through which users have access to the bibliographic data of Library’s catalogue, according to Linked Open Data premises, using semantic web standards and technologies.

Apart from the data stored in the traditional catalogue, datos.bne.es also includes information from external sources such as Wikipedia and other international bibliographic data bases; including links to digitalized examples from the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica (Digital Hispanic Library). Still in beta, the licence applied to data is CC0 (Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication), a completely free licence focused on promoting the re-use of information.

To enable the localization of information, the National Library of Spain provides search mechanisms for users who want to access and re-use the data, according to four information categories.

Datos.bne.es proposes a new way of aproaching to collections and resources of the National Library of Spain; being the first milestone of its PSI plan, which is the response to the numerous demands on openning up the bibliographic data generated and held by this public body and it is aimed to guarantee the access and spread of the information while it promotes its re-use as the mean for cultural, social and economic enrichment.

Apart from boosting the re-use of bibliographic data, the National Library of Spain also wants to promote the access and reuse of 175,000 pieces of work in public domain available in the Digital Hispanic Library and the Digital Newspaper Library. To this end, a Collaboration Agreement with Red.es was signed in 10th March 2016, with a budget of €2.25 million to provide the new portal with the necessary tools, content and capacities to promote the use and re-use of data.