About

WW1 Discovery is a proof-of-concept project with the aim of making digital content resources more discoverable both by people and machines.  We’re looking to achieve this by building an aggregation API and discovery layer for content from a range of digital collections, and by finding new and innovative ways of presenting this content for the benefit of education and research.

The guiding vision for the project is that “UK students, teachers and researchers will have easy, flexible and ongoing access to WW1 content and service through a collaborative, aggregated and integrated resource discovery and delivery framework which is comprehensive, open and sustainable.”

Funded by JISC, WW1 Discovery builds on activity undertaken by Kings College London , which identified and synthesised content in this area and identified the requirements of researchers and teachers.  The project aims to deliver the technical vision of the overarching World War One Aggregation programme by building an exemplar to illustrate the principles of the Discovery initiative as well as a tool that will support researchers and teachers.  We want to explore how data can be made to work harder, integrated and combined in new ways that can add value for researchers, teachers, and managers of information assets within libraries, archives and museums.

We’ll capture our lessons learned throughout the project here on this blog, including the challenges and opportunities around identifying appropriate content for a Discovery approach to aggregation, documenting and reflecting on the technical approaches taken to developing the API, and also our reflecting on our work with third party suppliers in creating innovative interfaces using the API.