Just a brief post to kick things off.
As this is my first post on our new blog a brief introduction is probably necessary. My name is Luke Dearnley and I am currently the Web Manager here at the Powerhouse Museum. Previously I worked here as a developer and therefore it is likely readers will detect a somewhat technical leaning to my posts.
So we are very excited to now have had our collection absorbed into the National Library of Australia’s Trove project. Apart from the big wins of being the first museum to have its collection included and the increase in traffic we are seeing to our full records on our own collection database pointed out by Seb Chan is his much more comprehensive post, there is the awesome fact that this makes them a big user of our Collection API.
The NLA will do monthly passes over our entire collection made available through the API and, while they have ingested over 75,000 objects to date, they will benefit from the regular monthly harvests we do of our collection system. In fact the next pass they do (later this week) should see the number of objects increase to closer to 95,000!
But thankfully it is not all about endless growth; in the future we hope to make use of Trove’s authority files of people and organisations, integrating them into our own collection and hopefully we will be able to pull back in tags added to our objects in a similar way to we have done with the Flickr Commons.
