The Library of Congress Makes 25 Million Records From Its Catalog Free to Download

Image by Car­ol High­smith, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

A quick fyi: Accord­ing to For­tune, The Library of Con­gress announced that it “will make 25 mil­lion records from its cat­a­log avail­able for the pub­lic to down­load.” They add:

Pri­or to this, the records—which include books and seri­als, music and man­u­scripts, and maps and visu­al mate­ri­als span­ning from 1968 to 2014—have only been acces­si­ble through a paid sub­scrip­tion. These files will be avail­able for free down­load on [the Library of Con­gress site] and are also avail­able on data.gov.

This move helps free up the library’s dig­i­tal assets, allow­ing social sci­en­tists, data ana­lysts, devel­op­ers, sta­tis­ti­cians and every­one else to work with the data “to enhance learn­ing and the for­ma­tion of new knowl­edge.” The huge data sets will be avail­able here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via For­tune

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Huge Archive of Amer­i­can Films–From Casablan­ca to Gigli–Are Pro­tect­ed & Pre­served in a Nuclear Bunker

Library of Con­gress Releas­es Audio Archive of Inter­views with Rock ‘n’ Roll Icons

Library of Con­gress Launch­es New Online Poet­ry Archive, Fea­tur­ing 75 Years of Clas­sic Poet­ry Read­ings