A call to action has been made to the UK’s cultural heritage sector to build a unified digital collection, or risk losing the opportunity to be a global leader in collections-based research. The proposal is laid out in Unlocking the potential of digital collections – a call to action – a policy document created by researchers from AHRC.
The policy document proposes that cultural heritage organisations and funding bodies come together to pursue a critical goal: the development of an inclusive, unified, accessible, interoperable and sustainable UK digital collection. It has been developed through extensive consultation across sector organisations, funders, large collection institutions and the programme’s research teams. In total 50 organisations contributed their knowledge and expertise, of which Wikimedia UK was one.
The researchers are part of the Towards a National Collection (TaNC) programme, which is a five-year, £18.9 million UK-wide research and development programme. It’s funded through the UK Research and Innovation’s Strategic Priorities Fund and delivered by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The programme was set up to explore ways of connecting separate collections, dissolving barriers and unifying data in a digital network across the UK’s museums, galleries, libraries and archives. A key objective of the programme has been to inform the future of UK digital collection development through a series of policy recommendations aimed at decision-makers and funders.
Daria Cybulska, Director of Programmes and Evaluation at Wikimedia UK says:
“Wikimedia UK collaborates with the heritage sector in the UK to facilitate their engagement with linked open data (Wikidata especially), and so we were pleased to be able to contribute to the TaNC programme over its lifecycle. It is encouraging to see the emphasis on open data standards in the policy recommendations. It is indeed through open knowledge that we can realise the programme’s ambition of dissolving barriers between separate collections. An open approach also means that agency is given to potential users of the linked collection, fostering a democratic model of knowledge consumption and creation. We look forward to supporting the implementation of the recommendations.”
Towards a National Collection Policy Recommendations
The call to action consists of ten recommendations to build a UK digital collection. They are supported by case studies and sample training materials, plus an appendix with information on all of the research that has been grant-funded or commissioned by the Towards a National Collection programme.
- Selection – how to select materials from which to build digital collections
- Production – how to make the data for a UK digital collection
- Skills – the skills we have and the skills we need for a UK digital collection
- Reuse and rights management – how to create sharable collections data
- Access and engagement – how to make data accessible to everyone
- Security – how to protect our collections from harm
- Preservation – how to ensure digital collections survive change
- Impact – how to understand the usage of digital collections
- Models and frameworks – how to help digital collections evolve
- Experimentation – research, development and innovation for digital collections
English and Welsh language versions of the Unlocking the potential of digital collections – a call to action are published under an open Creative Commons licence. If you would like to order free print copies for yourself and your organisation, please contact: sophie.dietrich@hes.scot.