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"But the Library of Congress (LC) has recently made authoritative subject cataloging data freely available on a new website. There, you can query it through standard interfaces, or simply download it all for analysis. I recently downloaded their full data set (38 MB of zipped RDF), processed it, and used it to build new subject maps for The Online Books Page. The resulting maps are substantially richer than what I had before. My collection is fairly small by the standards of mass digitization- just shy of 40,000 items- but still, the new data, after processing, yielded over 20,000 new subject relationships, and over 600 new notes and explanations, for the subjects represented in the collection."

"More recently, I've used the same data to make my subjects more consistent and up to date. In this post, I'll describe why I need to do this, and why doing it isn't as hard as I feared that it might be."