The Old Shop's 99 Datasets, Pointed at Where the Data Lives Today
By glitchdata Team 2 min read
The old glitchdata shop sold 99 compiled datasets — postcodes, electoral boundaries, company registers, transport timetables, and a long tail of reference tables that were tedious to assemble in 2014 and are still tedious now. They have all been migrated to the hub.
What Migrating Actually Meant
Each product description was a page of prose with the useful parts buried in it. The importer pulled them apart into the fields a dataset page expects: the introduction, the metadata field list, the sources, the formats and the licence. Those are now structured, searchable and filterable, instead of being a paragraph somebody had to read.
Most of Them Have a Better Source Than Us
The harder question was honesty. Most of these were compiled by Glitchdata Research years ago, and for the great majority the same data is published today by the organisation that owns it — an electoral commission, a statistics agency, a standards body, a government open-data portal.
So each dataset records where the data can be had now, and that link is what the page leads with. If an official register publishes it, you should get it from the register: it will be current, it will keep being current, and it will carry the publisher's own licence.
Eight have no authoritative source left — the body that published them has gone, or the series stopped. Those still point at the compiled file, and the page says that is what it is rather than dressing it up.
The Hub Does Not Hold the Files
This is the same rule as everything else here: glitchdata references, it does not store. A dataset page catalogues what exists, previews the first rows of a table where it can, and counts downloads — then sends you to whoever publishes the file. Nothing is mirrored, so nothing here can quietly go stale while looking current.