In our daily lives, we are awash in data, visualizations and analysis.
Libraries, too, recognize the potential power in expressing our collections
and their content as data, and we've made some strides in putting this data
online to be downloaded, manipulated, recombined, and analyzed. But who is
actually using and making sense of it? If we are to encourage a data
revolution in libraries, we will need to make our data more accessible and
malleable to more people, civilians and librarians alike, in formats that
work with common tools and that make it easy for anyone to learn about the
potentials and limitation in our data and collections. Having learned some
tough lessons from technical and institutional challenges in generating,
publishing, and stewarding open cultural heritage data, we're working on a
way to look beyond current library practices to get open data out and about
the world and into the hands of people of all skillsets. We're putting out
a call to you to join us in breaking open datasets free from their
institutional homes, repackaging them in more standard, tool-friendly data
structures, and promoting them more widely. Using the Frictionless Data
spec, the Internet Archive, and open data from all around the library world
as an example, we'll show a possible model for liberating data for wider
use.