This policy reaffirms the British Library’s commitment to making metadata as open as possible, and confirms the terms of licence, limitations and exceptions for sharing the British Library's open metadata.
The British Library has supplied bibliographic metadata services to national and international library communities since its foundation. This is in line with the requirements of the Act of Parliament which led to its establishment in 1972. The Act records that the organisation’s corporate responsibility is to be ‘a national centre for reference, study and bibliographical and other information services’ (British Library Act, (1972, Ch. 54)).
From 2010, the British Library began to offer a range of new open metadata services aimed at expanding usage of its metadata beyond the library world. Activities were initially aimed at developers and other technical or expert users in line with the UK Government’s guidance of the time on public sector open data.
Since 2015, open metadata services have formed part of the mission statement in three successive Collection Metadata strategies, including the most recent, Sustainability Through Change (PDF, 853.9KB), issued in 2023:
‘Our vision is that the Library’s collection metadata assets will be integrated on a coherent, sustainable, standards-based infrastructure offering improved options for productivity, access, collaboration and open reuse.’
This vision aligns with the broader corporate strategy set out by Knowledge Matters (PDF, 2.8MB) in 2023:
‘We make our intellectual heritage accessible to everyone, for research, inspiration and enjoyment.’
‘Sustainability Through Change’ describes collection metadata as ‘the metadata used to: manage, access, preserve and describe the collection’. The open sharing of metadata enhances discovery, improves collection visibility, and creates opportunities for innovation through reuse. By making metadata openly available, the British Library can extend its reach, foster collaboration, and fulfil its mission to make intellectual heritage accessible to all.
The October 2023 cyber-attack brought some disruption to British Library services. This document reaffirms the British Library’s commitment to making metadata as open as possible in the post-cyber environment; in doing so it builds on a previous policy document ‘Sharing British Library Open Metadata with Non-Library Communities’ from 2017. It also acknowledges the exceptions and limitations which may sometimes be imposed on making metadata openly accessible due to commercial, security, technical and resourcing constraints.
Our communities are all British Library users, unless otherwise specified under exceptions.
Open metadata services aim to offer consistent, sustainable, secure products using the formats, standards, licensing and access options appropriate to our communities.
The default licence offered is Creative Commons (CC0). This is in line with comparable open metadata services such as Europeana and research infrastructure such as the Barcelona Declaration and the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure.
Although pre-defined, standard options are the default for our communities, bespoke offerings may be considered on a case-by-case basis (e.g. charities, strategic collaborators, etc.). All metadata requests or communications are handled by the metadata@bl.uk email account with background information presented via the relevant Collection Metadata web pages.
All collection metadata is made available under open licences unless otherwise specified under exceptions.
Details of the supported products, formats, delivery methods, platforms and licensing options are presented on the Collection Metadata Services webpage.
All collection metadata is in scope, provided it can be openly licensed, i.e. there are no contractual obligations with third parties. For example, catalogue metadata may not be routinely released in MARC format, because of contractual agreements with third parties. Catalogue Metadata may not be released in circumstances where its method of production and / or delivery are not in alignment with the requirements of Cyber Essentials. In addition, limitations on provision may be imposed by the unavailability of infrastructure supported by third parties and / or the unavailability of staff who maintain that infrastructure.
Service options will be subject to review and development in line with UK Government guidance and changing technical or operational environments.
Document date: August 2026
