Over the last 12 months museums and archive services in the Black Country have been working together to make their collections infomation available online via our Black Country History website.
As the latest phase in this project we are looking for web developers, designers and programmers to help us explore ideas about how our data feed can be used to create new and interesting things.
Metadata for our museum and archive items is available as an Application Programmer’s Interface (API) that is easy to use and quick to get started with. The API is based upon OpenSearch, and by default takes a Lucene style query syntax.
Via the API you can submit search queries to return metadata about our museum and archive collection items – items which vary hugely; works of art and decorative art objects, historical objects and old photographs, documents and maps, costume and jewellery, the list is endless… and many of the records also have associated images.
To see the sort of things in the Black Country data feed have a look at our Black Country History website.
Our data is also fed into the Culture Grid which has it’s own API. There is an even larger range of items in the Culture Grid data feed as it includes things from museums and archives from all across the UK, check out the Culture Grid website for more information.
