Open Data Possibilities

This poster looks at the Royal Danish Library open data challenges and future possibilities from a technical perspective. The Royal Danish Library preserves a large number of digital national heritage collections.

The digital data includes 35 million digitised newspaper pages from 1666 until today, as well as digitised letters and books. The Royal Danish Library also holds Danish radio and TV broadcasts from the mid 80’ies until today and several collections of older audio-visual material, not to mention the Danish Internet Archive with its 790 TB or 39,663,671,468 objects collected and preserved from the Danish part of the internet since 2005. Other very interesting data is e.g., aerial photographs with 5.2 million objects from the period 1936-1992, as well as maps, handwritten collections, early and rare prints, musical notes, and architectural drawings.

All data of more than 140 years of age as well as a number of “younger” collections are open to the general public, while some more data are open to students and researchers under different licenses. During the Covid19 lockdown in 2020 even more material was opened to the general public. Over the last 30 years, a large number of access applications as well as APIs have been developed for specific collections and specific use cases, audiences and interests.

Among other applications, there are the library system, which has been enriched with a number of digitised collections; The Mediestream (media stream) portal developed to achieve better searches and presentations of radio, TV and newspapers; the DanmarkSetFraLuften application, which is a crowd sourcing project aiming at getting library users involved in locating aerial photographs on a map and gathering information about the photos. A number of APIs (api.kb.dk) has been developed for aerial photographs, digital collections and text collections. LOAR (the Library Open Access Repository) is a research data repository for open data from both researchers and library collections. MeLOAR is short for Mediestream for LOAR and was developed as dedicated front-ends for collections in LOAR. MeLOAR is one of the applications available from KB Labs. Another KB Labs application is the Cultural Heritage Cluster, where researchers can run complicated analyses on large data sets such as web archive data.

The Royal Danish Library has many open data, which are both findable and accessible already. Our ambition is to make more data available to more people. Challenges include making more digital open data more easily available; with digital humanities moving from close to distant reading, the library as well as the researcher would like more easy access APIs as well as more specialised tools and platforms; the library IT department as well as the researchers would like standards for APIs and applications. The plan is to develop exactly this. In this paper we present the many types of access applications matching different data and metadata already running. We also present plans and wishes for better digital access to even more Royal Danish Library data.