ODI Friday lunchtime lecture: Opening up the Science Museum

Museum collection catalogues are a perpetual work in progress. Over the years, they have evolved from straight-up inventory management to online publications with digitised images for all to see. In early 2017 the Science Museum Group relaunched its online collection of digitised objects, under a Creative Commons licence via a public API. The museum hopes that the open data will be used in many ways. Researchers might use it to explore the collection using computation analysis, software programmers might use it to explore new interfaces and discovery tools for the collection, and creatives might use the data and images in their work. This lecture will present the outcomes from a hack day held in February to bring together technologists, designers and creatives to experiment with how this open data could be used. The hack day was run as part of the museum’s Digital Lab initiative, supported by Samsung. About the speakers John Stack is Digital Director of the Science Museum Group. He joined the group in 2015 and is responsible for setting and delivering the group’s digital strategy. Prior to joining the Science Museum Group, he was Head of Digital at Tate for ten years. Dave Patten is Head of New Media at the Science Museum. He manages all aspects of new media from conceptual design to prototyping and production. He has a background in electronics and computer science, and has worked at the Science Museum for over 30 years. Jamie Unwin is Technical Architect for the Science Museum’s Collection Online. Since building a web-based London Underground route finder for his BSc project in 1995, Jamie helped launch The Guardian website and later set up a platform used by the BBC, The Guardian, Sony Playstation and London 2012 Olympics. In 2015 he joined the Science Museum to wrangle data and systems to relaunch the collection website.