Open Data Publishing by Public Libraries

Public libraries in the USA are part of a broad civic information ecosystem that is rapidly adopting transparency legislation aimed at publishing structured open data for public reuse. In this preliminary results paper we look specifically at the open data publishing practices of 85 public libraries in the USA. We find that less than half of these libraries have published any open data, and that there is no relationship between revenue nor staff size and open data publishing practices. Categorizing public library open data by type we find overwhelmingly the most frequent type of open data published by libraries are geospatial (map) information. We plan use these findings to develop a proposal for public libraries to engage in publishing a core set of open data, and conclude by discussing the potential for reuse of open public library data.