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.

This section of the site is all about step 2. It will be used to provide developers with the information they need to find and reuse the metadata they are interested in.

In addition to providing resources via this site the Discovery programme will be working with the JISC DevCSI project which is run by UKOLN. This project supports developers working in Higher Education and we’ll be collaborating with them to organise training, hackfests and competitions to encourage developers to engage with this exciting collection of metadata.

This part of the site is still under construction but we plan to include the following content:

• Links to sources of metadata that can be reused from museums, libraries, archives and other relevant sources
• Clear information on licences for each dataset
• Details of professional development and hack events to bring developers together and generate (and build) ideas
• Examples of interesting applications and links to how tos and other useful information
• Examples of ideas from stakeholders for how innovators can add value to metadata, and how this can relate to business cases
• Links to useful 'must reads' for developers to stay up-to-date on latest discussions and trends

Keep up to date with progress on the Discovery programme by following the #ukdiscovery hashtag

This part of the Discovery programme is very much a work in progress and we’re keen to hear from developers and other interested parties on what would be useful and what is needed. You can tell us what you want by blogging and we’ll feed the posts into the site. Alternatively you can contact Andy McGregor directly to discuss ideas and issues (a.mcgregor@jisc.ac.uk)

Who do we mean by developers and why are they important?

There is a strong trend towards provision of open data among public bodies in the UK and worldwide. This trend is founded on the efforts of clever people who can reuse the data to produce illuminating new ways to view and explore the open data. These people come from a range of backgrounds and interests from the commercial, public and voluntary and community sectors and are generally referred to using the catch all title of developers.

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 these clever people from getting at the metadata about library, archive and museum collections and enabling them to build interesting and unexpected applications.

The hope is that the Discovery programme can support people from Higher Education and other sectors in finding useful ways to reuse this data. JISC will also be funding some specific projects to develop services that the community require as well as seeking to work with commercial vendors to develop new applications.

The purpose of this part of the website is not only to point to relevant datasets but to remove any uncertainty in how they can be used and to provide resources that support developers in building the applications that the sector needs.