Hacking the archive – GLAM Labs workshop at the University of Edinburgh

On 24 June I gave a ‘Hacking the archive’ workshop at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, University of Edinburgh. The workshop was organised by the EFI, the National Library of Scotland, and the IIPC. It preceded the GLAM Labs Futures conference, also held at the EFI.

The workshop was an expanded version of the ‘hacking the library’ session I ran for the State Library of Victoria’s Code Club in September last year. The aim of the workshop was first to give participants the confidence to poke around in websites – to play with urls, look under the hood to see how web pages are put together in the browser, and think about how they might be different. We then explored how you can change the way web pages look and work using bookmarklets and userscripts.

The slides are fairly detailed, and you can probably try a number of the activities yourself if you’re interested.

The bookmarklets and userscripts we experimented with all change aspects of the NLS website – such as inserting links or images. They’re all available in this GitHub repository and could be modified to work with other sites.

The warm weather and jet lag meant I needed to be revived at various points by ice blocks (thanks Olga!), but it was a fun session, and by the end it was great to see people planning and building their own website hacks!