The Linked Open British National Bibliography

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.

We intend to withdraw the publication of the datasets (RDF/XML and N-Triples) currently available from our Downloads page and data.gov.uk as they are structured according to a different data model.

Access to the data via data dumps or SPARQL endpoint will be provided from the new system in the future.


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 5 million records.

Data and Resources

Additional Info

Field Value
Last Updated September 4, 2023, 14:59 (UTC)
Created February 25, 2014, 10:08 (UTC)
Theme Education