By Justin Grimes Statistician, IMLS Last weekend was National Day of Civic Hacking, an event that saw more than 11,000 people join together in more than 95 events across the country to collaboratively create, build, and invent using publicly-released data to address challenges both locally and nationally. IMLS participated in this event with other federal agencies by providing data and challenges for civic hackers to hack on. Some of IMLS-related projects included new ways to improve IMLS data collection efforts, mobile apps, and visualizations of public libraries and museums. Winning projects from around the country will be presented next month at a White House event. Libraries and museums across the nation also got involved by hosting their own events including hackathons, editathons, and mini-maker faires. They also provided their own data and challenges for National Day of Civic Hacking. Here is an abbreviated list of just some of the events:

• Adler Planetarium in Chicago, IL - Hosted a youth-focused community-driven hackathon. http://hackforchange.org/civic-hack-day-youth-focused-chicago-civic-challenge
• Annapolis Library in Annapolis, MD - Hosted an edit-a-thon to share and collaborate local knowledge. http://hackforchange.org/annapoliswiki-editathon
• Brooklyn Public Library in New York, NY - Hosted a Design/HACKATHON to create tools to help the city’s public school parents. http://hackforchange.org/nycpublicorgs-designhackathon-creating-power-tools-public-school-parents

• Chattanooga Public Library in Chattanooga, TN - hosted a hackathon. http://hackforchange.org/open-chattanooga-hack-thon
• Dawson County Library in Dawsonville, GA - Hosted a Maker Day. http://hackforchange.org/dawsonville-maker-day

• Tulsa City-County Library in Tulsa, OK - Hosted an edit-a-thon, a meet-up, and other events. http://hackforchange.org/national-day-civic-hacking-tulsa
• Loussac Library's Innovation Lab in Anchorage, Alaska - Hosted meet-ups and a civic tech expo. http://hackforchange.org/anchorage-day-civic-hacking

• Walter’s Art Museum in Baltimore, MD - Opened their data and shared a dataset of their online collections including images of the artwork. http://www.hackforchange.org/dataset/walters-art-museum-online-collection-data

• Digital Public Library of America - Provided data and challenges. http://hackforchange.org/challenge/hacking-digital-public-library-america

• Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC - Provided data and challenges relating to the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. https://hackpad.com/Hack4DC-Smithsonian-Folkways-Musical-Timeline-Challenge-PulUXPc7Eam
• EdVenture Children's Museum, Columbia Museum of Art,  and Richland Library in Columbia, SC - Hosted hackathons, a mini-maker faire, and taught classes. http://hackforchange.org/south-carolina-day-civic-hacking-june-1-2-2013

These libraries and museums demonstrated their longstanding and continual role as incubators for innovation and empowerment within their local community. At IMLS, we plan to continue to reach out to developers who want to use our data in new and exciting ways. During the event we got some great suggestions from the community and we will continue to provide more data and more resources in the coming months to better facilitate this type of public innovation. In the meantime, we hope that people will continue to explore our datasets. If you worked on an IMLS-related project during National Day of Civic Hacking or you know of a library or museum that did something for National Day of Civic Hacking we would love to hear from you. So please contact us and happy civic hacking!