‘Hack on the Record’ at the National Archives

Photo of the National Archives by Nick Cooper (CC-by-SA)

Exciting news from the UK National Archives, they’re opening up their vaults and holding their first hack day. As Jo Pugh writes on their website:

Over the weekend of 24 and 25 March, The National Archives is holding its first hack day.
We will be opening up the archives to web developers and designers to encourage them to gather and exchange ideas and make use of The National Archives’ data and documents.

We want to work with developers who share our interest in history, government and culture, to devise and build systems using our records, as well as datasets from across the web. Non-developers are also welcome – anyone with ideas for interesting tools, visualisations or systems developers could build using our data.

On the day, we will have records experts from The National Archives on hand, together with colleagues from the British Museum, British Library and Wikimedia UK to talk about their data and to pitch ideas.

In the run up to the event The National Archives will be publishing a list of datasets to be used on the day.

The Archives are responding to specific requests for datasets and even offering to do some limited digitisation work. Requests should be emailed to education@nationalarchives.gsi.gov.uk.

The event is free but places are limited. So grab a place and sign up here.

For more info and updates on the event visit their blog.