Over the past few weeks I’ve been exploring the Public Record Office Victoria’s public API. There’s not a lot of documentation, but there is a lot of data!

What’s not immediately obvious is that the API includes information about a variety of different entities within the PROV’s model for archival description – not just items, but functions, agencies, series and more. You can limit your API requests to a particular entity using the category field. You can also request facet counts from the category field to tell you how many of each type of entity are available from the API.

I’ve been documenting this sort of information in notebooks for inclusion in the forthcoming PROV section of the GLAM Workbench. But I thought it might be useful to pull a few things together as a standalone dashboard, providing an overview of the PROV collection. So, here it is!

The dashboard tells you how many records are currently available through the API, and breaks down this count by entity, and category. It then works through the main entities – functions, agencies, series, items, and images – displaying a series of charts and tables that give you an idea what they’re actually made up of.

The dashboard is hosted on GitHub and is automatically updated every Sunday. In the future, I’ll do more to highlight changes over time.