If you happen to have some free time on your hands this summer, why not consider entering the JISC Discovery Programme‘s Open Data Challenge?
The aim of the challenge is to use material from one of ten rich data-sets to create a software application which will allow users to discover “treasures” that might otherwise go missed in the mass of data. Entrants can draw upon data-sets from the British Library, the UK’s National Archives, circulation data from UK university libraries, and data from the Tyne and Wear Museums collections.
The Discovery Programme is “…about making resources more discoverable both by people and machines.” The Challenge is designed to work on the ways we think about our data-sets and what we can do with them. Since many cultural institutions, including libraries with collections in a variety of formats including digital, are making their data-sets available, what can be done with this new information that might make new topics of research available? how can the intersections of these (often massive) data-sets work to throw light on topics of interest to researchers?
The winner of the last competition was Alex Parker of the University of Southampton with a project called Book Galaxy. Make sure your Java is up to date and check out his fascinating take on the data.
As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!