Collections as Data: Machine-readable interfaces for digital collections

Galleries, Museums, Libraries and Archives (GLAM) have been digitizing textual documents, images, records and serving them online for many years. In many cases, even though the digitized content is openly available to the public, the web interfaces were designed for humans to consume the information. Treating “collections as data” is gaining traction in the library world, and, a well-structured data archive, supported with the right tools, will enable research scholars and interested and curious community members to ask questions and draw interesting patterns from the archive.

As part of our ongoing efforts to leverage technology and enhance our digital collections, we are adding machine-friendly interfaces to our digitized content. The pilot project is focused on the historical newspapers archive. The interface acts as an intermediary that transforms requests and responses, in between the client (software programs) and the data archive.

In this poster, we will talk about the importance of looking at collections as data, our work with digital collections and demonstrate the usefulness of this approach with specific examples.

Presenter(s): Dhanushka Samarakoon, Assistant Head Software Development, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah / Harish Maringanti, Associate Dean for IT & Digital Library Services, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah

03:30 PM
Foyer