Over at our brother blog Opening the Catalogue: State Records NSW’s Open Data Project our colleague Richard Lehane is asking for your help.
State Records NSW is now inviting our regular users to trial http://api.records.nsw.gov.au as a new search tool for accessing the State Archives collection.
If you have tried this new search tool, and have feedback to give, we would love to hear it. We are actively developing the tool and would like to make it as useful and as intuitive as possible. So please post any feedback you have as comments to this blog post
LODLAM stands for Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives and Museums.
This is a very exciting, innovative area. If you do a Google search on “LODLAM” you bring up a lot of hits, however, sitting right at the top of the list is lod-lam.net. I’ve embedded an Introductory talk on LODLAM by Jon Voss from that site which is a great place to start the LODLAM journey. If you’d like to learn more then I’d highly recommend exploring the websites resources further; they include talks, slideshows, reading lists and information on upcoming events. For those of us in the Southern Hemisphere it’s also worth noting the LODLAM-NZ is coming up in Wellington on 1 December 2011 (Bookings Open).
On to the talk (and accompanying slideshow)….
The Smithsonian Institution hosted a day of LODLAM on September 16, 2011, including the presentation, An Introduction to Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives & Museums. The talk was webcast live and archived thanks to the generous support of the Smithsonian CTO Series. I’d also like to thank Effie Kapsalis for her amazing organizing efforts around the events, the many staff at the Smithsonian who helped make this a reality, and a great group of participants.
Let’s be clear: no-one is messing with the ‘purity’ of the data; it all remains intact. Information stored in databases isn’t compromised – these clever techno-savvy types are simply thinking more laterally than most of us and demonstrating the less travelled, but nevertheless important, paths the data can take.
State Records NSW recently established an Open Data Project with the aim of identifying datasets relating to the NSW State Archives collection and publishing them in accessible ways.
