Developers

The RDTF Vision is extremely simple:

1. Advocate the provision of open and reusable metadata about the collections of libraries museums and archives.
2. Provide easy and simple access to the reusable metadata so as wide a range of developers as possible can reuse it to build innovative and useful services.
3. Provide those services to researchers, teachers, students and information professionals.

Step 2 of the Vision recognises the important role that developers are playing in driving forward the current trend towards provision of open data among public bodies in the UK and worldwide. This section of the website aims to provide developers with the information they need to find and reuse the open metadata they are interested in.

In addition to providing resources via this site, the Discovery programme has been working with the JISC DevCSI project which is run by UKOLN. This project supports developers working in Higher Education and we've collaborated with them to organise training, 'hackfests' and a competition to encourage developers to engage with this exciting collection of metadata.

The aim of the Discovery programme is to provide innovative services that take advantage of the rich metadata about the collections of libraries museums and archives and that meet the needs of researchers, teachers and students. The vision outlines an approach that involves removing the barriers that prevent developers from getting at the metadata about library, archive and museum collections and enabling them to build interesting and unexpected applications.

The Discovery programme made 10 openly licensed datasets available as part of the Developer Competition held in 2011, all of which are still available for developers to experiment with. We have also collated a list of 10 Open Data Resources that contains a rich collection of open data sources from across the academic, cultural, heritage, and public sectors.