Tag: online

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'Cosmic Collections' in the tech press

The 'Cosmic Collections' crowdsourced web mashup competition I ran was picked up by two very cool web developer sites, the Yahoo Developer Network and the Programmable Web.

Yahoo Developer Network: A new API and hack competition – this time not from a tech company but by a museum!

Programmable Web: Science Museum Opens API and Challenges Developers to Mashup the Cosmos

Two favourite quotes: a "crusade to bring museums out into the open as places of innovation rather than preservation" (Yahoo) and, "with the rollout of a new API to provide access to information about some of its exhibits, the museum itself has become an example of technological innovation" (Programmable Web).

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Museum API wiki

I've been maintaining a publicly-editable wiki, museum-api.pbwiki.com since early 2009.  The impetus was the development of an API for a subset of the Science Museum's collections.  I introduced it with a post on Open Objects, Get thee to a wiki – the great API challenge in action, saying:

Help us work on an informal, lightweight way of devising shared data, API standards for museum and cultural heritage organisations – museum-api.pbwiki.com is open for business.

These days, the focus is on collating a list of cultural heritage APIs and open and/or linked datasets from museums, libraries, galleries, archives etc and collecting examples of things made with cultural and historical data, with the core goal of cultural heritage organisations make content re-usable and helping programmers access cultural and historic content.

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Report: The Tony Dyson Archive Project: Report of a pilot study investigating the creation of a digital archive of medieval property transactions along the City waterfront

A write-up of some requirements analysis and database work I did for a pilot with the Museum of London Archaeology Service on digitising an archive of  medieval property records of the parishes (mostly Hustings Rolls, the records of the medieval Court of Husting).  The report is co-authored with Nick Holder and Nathalie Cohen.

The Tony Dyson Archive Project: Report of a pilot study investigating the creation of a digital archive of medieval property transactions along the City waterfront (PDF)

(PDF version of report, without mapping and plan diagrams.)