Please note: The Linked Open BNB has moved to a new (beta) home: https://bl.natbib-lod.org
The British National Bibliography is the first national bibliography tenant for the Share Family National Bibliographies Portal. For further details on this initiative, please see our blogpost [https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2023/07/share-family-british-national-bibliography.html].
This service is made available in BETA. You can tell us what you think about the service or report problems by contacting metadata@bl.uk.
At the moment, the BNB is available through this human readable portal and descriptions of entities can be downloaded one at a time. Access to the data via data dumps or SPARQL endpoint will be provided from the new system in the future.
From 2011 to 2022, the Linked Open BNB was published to a different data model. Some historic datasets are available from the British Library Research Repository pending the creation of more comprehensive documentation about the whole project.
The British National Bibliography (BNB) records the publishing activity of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland and has been doing so since the 1950s. This has traditionally included printed works and has recently been extended to electronic publications. The dataset includes metadata about published books, already published and forthcoming, and serials i.e. journals, periodicals, magazines, newspapers, etc.
The Linked Open BNB is a subset of the full British National Bibliography. It currently includes published and forthcoming books and serial publications, representing approximately over 6 million records.