The Digital Library Programme’s Access for All project intends to improve the existing Collections.Ed infrastructure to better serve a wide range of users allowing better discovery, display, research, teaching and sharing of and utilisation of the University’s diverse collections.

This will be split into two main pieces of work, the creation of the GLAM Data & API Service and the re-design of the front-end of Collections.Ed (DLIB014). 

For this project , we are focussing on the former – the design of the required APIs to fetch data from the GLAM Data & API Service. 

In the same way that Google aimed to organise all the world’s information, the GLAM API Service aims to organise all of L&UC’s collection items. The GLAM Data & API Service will take in data from all the L&UC data sources such as DSpace (Cultural Heritage Collections), ArchivesSpace (Archives), Vernon (Museums) - 'Golden Copy Data' and sort it, unify it, process it in various ways for presentation to users.

Population of the data and image servers within the service will happen from the golden copies in the back-end and digital representations of the collection items. By collating the data from the multiple back-end systems in one location, we can sort and process the data efficiently, enabling unified searching across our collections which is functionality that has been sorely lacking from Collections.Ed.