Digital scholarship blog

Enabling innovative research with British Library digital collections

11 February 2013

Mashups, Linked Data, APIs, Oh My!

Our internal Digital Scholarship Training Programme is running at full speed now and we’re nearly through the first semester having held 9 of the 15 courses we've developed! Over 70 curators have participated in one or more of them and I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to give a full report on this initiative in Nebraska this summer at #dh2013.  

Last week we had Owen Stephens over to teach a full day course to staff on the topic of Information Integration:  Mashups, APIs and Linked Data from the library perspective.  I initially took inspiration for the course from one held at USC’s Information Sciences Institute. That one you’ll see covers these topics over 16 weeks, so Owen did a masterful job covering them in a meaningful way in less than 8 hours!

 

P2060063
Emma Goodliffe, International Dunhuang Project and Jennifer Howes, Curator of Visual Arts

The aim of ours was very specific to how Mashups, APIs and Linked Data are playing out in the cultural heritage realm with a view towards providing curators with the opportunity and inspiration for situating their own curatorial interests there. One of the best pieces of advice he gave on the day was to build things which we find useful. If APIs fulfil our own requirements, to enable new more efficient workflows for providing digital content for instance, they’ll find the support and maintenance required to keep them alive and well. To put that into practice, Owen worked up a really nice exercise which allowed curators to access our very own British National Bibliography API. He’s posted it here - do have a go! 

Nora McGregor
Digital Curator
@ndalyrose
 

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