The National Museum Challenge
National Day of Civic Hacking:
Institute of Museum and Library Services
Dates: June 1 and 2, 2013
Website: http://hackforchange.org/challenge/public-library-challengemuseum-data-challenge-2-challenges
The first National Day of Civic Hacking will take place in communities across America—and at the White House—on June 1 and 2, 2013. The event will be the largest ever to bring together citizens from around the country to work with local, state, and federal governments—as well as private sector organizations—with the common goal of improving their community through technology. The Institute of Museum and Library Services will join other federal agencies in presenting national challenges that citizen hackers will tackle at more than 90 events across the country.
As part of the event, IMLS will provide two challenges, one relating to public libraries and another relating to museums. The public library challenge will ask participants to use data from IMLS annual public library data collection efforts to develop tools that will help allow citizens and others to explore public library data in new ways. The museum data challenge will ask participants to build tools that help enrich IMLS national museum data collection efforts using administrative data from the MuseumsCount survey. Participants can access information about the library and museum challenges and data sets at the hackforchange.org website.
IMLS is currently developing the Museums Count survey to establish comprehensive, reliable data about the size, distribution, and scope of the museum sector in the United States. While this survey is in the process of being deployed, for this challenge we are providing unreleased raw data that includes basic information for more than35,000 target museums including art, history, children’s, and natural history museums; science and technology centers, historical societies, botanic gardens, arboreta, zoos and aquariums.
Museum Challenge Description
- Develop tools to verify and clean existing name and location data.
- Help build better museum records by filling-in missing data fields.
- Augment the museum records with institutional URLs and other details that would be helpful for public way finding.
- Develop a tool or a set of tools that allows citizens and others to interactively explore the museum data (e.g. visualizations, dashboards).
- Enrich this dataset with other available data sources (e.g. Foursquare, Google Places, Yelp).
Functional Specifications
- All code must be open source and accessible online.
- Tools should be user-friendly and accessible (e.g. Section 508 compliant).
Resources
Museums Count (beta) survey data:
http://go.usa.gov/TS4Gv (csv data)
http://go.usa.gov/TS4z (documentation)
More Information
To find an event near you, visit the hackforchange.org website. For more information about IMLS challenges, please contact Justin Grimes, jgrimes@imls.gov
