Harvard Releases Metadata Into Public Domain

Harvard is making more than 12 million catalog records from its 73 libraries publicly available under a Creative Commons public domain license, the university announced today.

The records can be bulk downloaded from Harvard in the standard MARC21 format, and are available for programmatic access by software applications via API at the Digital Public Library of America(DPLA).

The records contain bibliographic information about books, videos, audio recordings, images, manuscripts, maps, and more, including creator, title, publisher, date, language, and subject headings, plus descriptors usually invisible to end users, such as the equalization system used in a recording.