Location
Room 207/205. Utah State University, Logan, UT
Document Type
Poster
Start Date
23-2-2018 3:30 PM
End Date
23-2-2018 4:00 PM
Description
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. With advances in technology overall - at the hardware level computing power and storage is getting cheaper and cheaper, while at the software level Artificial Intelligence and machine learning tools are getting easier to use - now is an opportune time to leverage technology and simplify user’s interaction with digital libraries and archives. 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.
At the University of Utah, as part of our ongoing efforts to leverage technology and enhance our digital collections, we are adding machine-friendly interfaces (API) to our digitized content.
The pilot project is focused on Utah Digital Newspapers (UDN) archive. The API is built on a PHP platform using Lumen framework and interacts with the indexed newspaper content (Apache Solr). The API acts as an intermediary that transforms requests and responses, in between the client (software programs) and the data archive. The API documentation is created using the Swagger framework. The framework enables the documentation to go beyond a traditional static document and allows the users to interact with the API.
In this presentation, we will talk about the importance of looking at collections as data, our API work with UDN and demonstrate the usefulness of this approach with specific examples.
Included in
The many faces (interfaces) of Historical Digitized Newspapers
Room 207/205. Utah State University, Logan, UT
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. With advances in technology overall - at the hardware level computing power and storage is getting cheaper and cheaper, while at the software level Artificial Intelligence and machine learning tools are getting easier to use - now is an opportune time to leverage technology and simplify user’s interaction with digital libraries and archives. 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.
At the University of Utah, as part of our ongoing efforts to leverage technology and enhance our digital collections, we are adding machine-friendly interfaces (API) to our digitized content.
The pilot project is focused on Utah Digital Newspapers (UDN) archive. The API is built on a PHP platform using Lumen framework and interacts with the indexed newspaper content (Apache Solr). The API acts as an intermediary that transforms requests and responses, in between the client (software programs) and the data archive. The API documentation is created using the Swagger framework. The framework enables the documentation to go beyond a traditional static document and allows the users to interact with the API.
In this presentation, we will talk about the importance of looking at collections as data, our API work with UDN and demonstrate the usefulness of this approach with specific examples.