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Web person at the Imperial War Museum, just completed PhD about digital sustainability in museums (the original motivation for this blog was as my research diary). Posting occasionally, and usually museum tech stuff but prone to stray. I welcome comments if you want to take anything further. These are my opinions and should not be attributed to my employer or anyone else (unless they thought of them too). Twitter: @jottevanger

Monday, June 09, 2008

Victorian photographers API now also alphatastic

Didn't manage (didn't dare) to upload this before going-home time on Friday. There is now another string to the bow of the nascent REST alpharama here. You can query the people in the database of 19th Century photographic London (pardon the contraction) at the PhotoLondon website we launched recently. Right now, it only sends you back a list of people matching your criteria (100 records per page) with no details. I will soon produce a detailed machine-friendly record page for each person (an example of a human-friendly one is here)

The querystring takes most of parameters you can see on the form including surname, forename, search text (but not multiple words like the form), gender, year of birth/death, "alive in..." year, place of origin, photographic occupation, non-photographic occupation, and presence of attached images. Here's an example search so you can see what you'll get back right now. Here's a wider one.

There are bugs, no doubt, and it will be of more use when I can send you the person's details, as well as a list of countries and occupations to build queries from. I realise I also need to write some proper documentation. Still, it's a start. Please tell me if it might be useful to you, and what you'd like to see it doing/do with it.

5 comments:

Daniel Pett said...

Jeremy
I think you might want to check your chmod status and also the code output on this api feed you mention. You have a code injection from www.adsitelo.com in your xml responses. http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/MuseumofLondon/food/rest.aspx?source=pldb&surname=smith&forename=al&gender=male&aliveyear=1850&photooccID=1&otheroccID=259
Dan

Jeremy said...

Thanks Dan, looking into it. Blimey, this is a new one to me!
Cheers, Jeremy

Jeremy said...

Well I've restored the database and tightened up the permissions so now we'll wait and see what happens. I'm following up what I can find about this infection and refreshing the virus scanner. Thanks for the tip!

Anonymous said...

"Server Error in '/museumoflondon' Application.
Could not find stored procedure 'sp_FullPersonSearch'. "

:)

Jeremy said...

man what a doofus I am. Somewhere along the way in tightening security I must also have lost that stored procedure. Some months ago. I'm guessing the API is not heavily used :-) Thanks Frankie!