Harvard Library releases big data for its books
Audrey Watters writes in part:
Harvard University announced this week that it would make more than 12 million catalog records from its 73 libraries publicly available. These records contain bibliographic information about books, manuscripts, maps, videos, and audio recordings. The Harvard Library is making these records available under a Creative Commons 0 license, in accordance with its Open Metadata Policy.
In MARC21 format, these records should lend themselves to a number of interesting uses.
I have always been curious about semantic drift across generations of librarians for subject headings.
Did we as users “learn” the cataloging of particular collections?
How can we recapture that “learning” in a topic map?