I’m very excited to be the new Creative Technologist-in-Residence at the SLV LAB. For the next few months I get to play around with metadata and images, think about online access, experiment with different technologies, and build things to help people to explore the State Library’s collections. In other words, I get to be in my happy place!

My group at the recent SLV WikiFest was thinking about ways of helping researchers find resources relating to particular locations – how do I find material about my suburb, or my street? Coincidentally, the main focus of my residency will also be place-based collections, so I get to really think through some of the possibilities. SLV staff have already pointed me to some amazing maps and photographs, such as the Committee for Urban Action collection, the Mahlstedt fire survey maps, the MMBW plans, and the Victorian parish maps.

At the same time, I’ll be using my usual GLAM hacking approach to poke around in the SLV website to try and understand what data is currently available, identify any roadblocks, and document opportunities for computational research.

The results of my residency will be shared on the SLV LAB site, in GitHub, in the SLV section of the GLAM Workbench, and of course here. As usual, I’ll be working in the open, documenting things as I go along, so please join me on the journey!

Although the residency was formally announced today, I’ve actually been working with SLV data for the last couple of weeks and I’ve already got a backlog of stuff I need to blog about. Here’s a taster – what happens when you generate bounding boxes for thousands of parish maps from the available metadata and throw them on a map…?