Libraries, museums and archives have recently taken to experimenting with open data with a vengeance and now the JISC Discovery programme with the DevCSI project are running an international competition to see what people can unearth in this data.

Open data challenge: what treasures can you find?

Libraries, museums and archives have recently taken to experimenting with open data with a vengeance and now the JISC Discovery programme with the DevCSI project are running an international competition to see what people can unearth in this data.

The challenge is to develop an application which allows people to discover the treasures hidden in one of ten datasets - from the shipwrecks lurking off UK shores, to the metadata behind Jane Austen’s will online.

The rich data sets on offer are:
  • library data from the British Library, Cambridge and Lincoln
  • archives data from the National Archives and the Archives hub
  • English Heritage places data
  • circulation data from UK university libraries
  • museum data from the Tyne and Wear Museums collections
  • search data from the OpenURL router service
  • the musicnet codex

Andy McGregor, JISC programme manager, said: "Libraries, museums and archives are opening up their data because they recognise the potential to harvest it in interesting new ways to make their collections more useful for education and research. Whether this is through striking visualisations, ways of exploring their content or valuable juxtapositions with other, similar collections, this competition is an opportunity to see what exciting possibilities clever developers can dream up for this rich pot of information."

The judges are interested in browser-based applications that genuinely make the collections from these libraries and museums even more useful for people.

There’s a tablet computer - an EEE Pad Transformer - for the overall winner but also twelve other prizes to be won.

The competition closes on 1 August 2011.

Read the rules of the competition on the Discovery site

Here's an example of what you could do with this data; Alex Parker from the University of Southampton, won a previous JISC competition by bringing to life library data with his Book Galaxy.

Book galaxy

Move your mouse around the galaxy to see the book titles and courses. Blue dots are books, yellow dots are courses. If nothing is appearing, you might not have Java installed. Download Java