There’s a brand new GLAM Workbench section to help you work with data from the Public Record Office Victoria!

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been poking around in the PROV’s collection API. The API provides data about PROV’s archival holdings in a machine readable format. This makes it possible to use, analyse, and visualise the collection in new ways.

I’ve already shared a few of the results of my explorations. There’s PROVbot sharing randomly-selected photos via the Fediverse; a data dashboard providing an overview of the PROV collection; and 6 million rows of PROV data added to the GLAM Name Index Search. At the same time I’ve been documenting how the API works, and the sorts of data it provides. I’ve now compiled this documentation into a Jupyter notebook – Getting started with the PROV API – and added it to the GLAM Workbench.

The PROV API provides a lot of rich, interconnected data, but there’s not much documentation on the PROV website. I’m hoping that this new section of the GLAM Workbench will encourage people to explore its possibilities. I’ll be adding more notebooks over time, examining the nature of the data in more depth, and probably creating a few useful tools and visualisations. Let me know if you have ideas for new notebooks!

I recently made one of the GLAM Workbench’s introductory notebooks available to run live using Jupyter Lite. This means the notebook loads everything it needs within your browser, rather than depending on a separate cloud service. The new PROV section comes with Jupyter Lite support baked in. If you go to the page describing the API notebook, you’ll notice there’s a brand new option to run the notebook using Jupyter Lite.

This is the first time I’ve integrated Jupyter Lite in this way, and I think it opens up some exciting possibilities. Not only does it make it easier and quicker to jump in and start playing, it means you can embed a live, working version of the notebook in any web page. Like this!

And a reminder – this work on the PROV API, like most of the GLAM Workbench, has received no direct funding. I do it because I want to help researchers use GLAM collections in new ways. If you’d like to support the GLAM Workbench you can sponsor me on GitHub or buy me a coffee. Most importantly, please share this information with anyone you think might find it useful.