The National Library of Spain launched its new open data portal, one of the main areas of work within the BNElab framework. The update, with a more functional design, technical improvements and new proposals in the discovery of datasets, is a step forward in the opening to information, making it a window of discovery to the potential wealth and value that the BNE’s data catalogue treasures.

The improvement, structuring, enrichment and public availability of the BNE’s dataset is one of the main lines of work within the institution’s digital strategy. The construction of its own portal of open and reusable data allows common enrichment with other institutions and communities, while encouraging citizen participation with specific tools developed on this occasion to facilitate access and the personalised creation of datasets.

On the home page of the open data portal you find a more user-friendly design thanks to the presentation and arrangement of the elements. For example, the search box includes popular tags to facilitate access to the datasets. And in the ‘Featured’ section you find two of the sets most used by users: the authorities record relating to people’s names and the collection of digitised works that have entered the public domain and are available in the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica.

“Explore and use open data”, gives access to the interface that allows using the API to create customised subsets of data from some of the Library’s available sets, which represents a real breakthrough in the customised use of the BNE’s dataset. There are many options: the user can select from the 20 datasets that make up the bibliographic and authority catalogue, choose different tags (MARC21, tags generated by us or both), add filters, and customise the data table to create subsets tailored to their needs; all with the possibility of downloading the datasets in accessible formats such as JSON or CSV, among other enhancements.

The Blog of the BNE’s open and reusable data portal offers examples of analysis and visualisations with the Library’s data, demonstrating and exemplifying the value and potential of these sets. The entry dedicated to the topics of books published in Spain explains, for example, how the topics of interest in books published in Spain have evolved, offering in turn a document on the process of data analysis and visualisation along with the result with a visualisation of the 20 most published subjects in each decade of the twentieth century, of great value for research.

Finally, it is worth highlighting the improvements implemented in the Biblioteca Nacional de España’s data catalogue, including the inclusion of new search options, new filters and the introduction of a new criterion for sorting results.

The openness, knowledge and value of the BNE’s data thus broadens its horizons with this new portal, which has great potential to generate not only economic wealth, but also social and cultural value for the general public. From today, anyone interested can access the portal to discover, analyse and research the data catalogue in order to generate possible subsets that provide new perspectives on our collections, and thus contribute to the living and collective memory of the country.