Building library networks with Linked Data

The KB, national library of the Netherlands, aims to provide unhindered access to the publicly funded library collections in the Netherlands. The KB has a long history of collaboration with partners in the domains of public libraries, cultural heritage and academics to achieve this goal. Publishing bibliographic metadata and content as open as possible and in a standardized way has been ongoing work for many years. In recent years this network effort has even become the core of our strategy. The KB decided to take this effort a step further by semantifying and publishing its bibliographic data as Linked Open Data and foster open access to the digital collections in the network. Publishing our bibliographic data as Linked Open Data opens the possibility for other organizations to harmonize their collection data and allows for integration with other open data environments outside the network of the KB. This talk gives a brief overview of the motivations and opportunities for publishing our core dataset as Linked Open Data and gives a short impression of the results so far.