image from The card catalogue: a practical manual for public and private libraries via Open Library
When people ask me what skills will be useful for the 21st Century Librarian one of the things I frequently mention is being able to work with giant datasets. This is true for many professions such as journalism but the past few years, even the past few months have really shown some exciting opportunities for people who work with libraries, and peopla who love metadata. Harvard’s release of 12 million bibliographic records was only the most recent giant dataset made available. Interested data manipulators also have metadata from the University of Mighigan, Cambridge University, the British Library, some records from the Library of Congress, University of North Carolina, Toronto Public Library and more smaller libraries and archives can be found via the Internet Archive. Exciting times to be sure.
[...] library released millions of MARC records into the wild recently. They’re not the first, as Jessamyn West points out, but as a wild creature herself, the Loon cannot but approve of additional wild [...]
Apparently the Copyright Office is trying to figure out how to put its card catalog of pre-1978 records online: http://www.infodocket.com/2012/05/01/u-s-copyright-office-posts-request-for-information-to-build-a-virtual-card-catalog-of-records/