Exploring Outreach through Medieval Seals

The proposed project, Exploring Outreach through Medieval Seals (ExOMS), will offer an important test-case approach to the ways in which an involved academic research project can be also applied beyond its immediate academic audience. The proposed project draws upon the AHRC-funded Seals in Medieval Wales (SiMeW) project and will reapply material and expertise gathered in that project and place it in new settings. In particular, it seeks to respond to the following identified aims of this funding stream, namely,

- To enhance the value and benefits of AHRC-funded research beyond academia
- To encourage and facilitate a range of interactions and creative engagements between arts and humanities research and a variety of other user communities, including, in this instance, third sector and heritage, voluntary and community groups and the general public. The project also anticipates interaction with business and commercial interests.


The SiMeW project team are exceptionally well-placed to provide an effective link between a variety of interested but not as yet interconnected parties. As the largest and most significant publically-funded seal recording project ever undertaken in the UK, SiMeW has unique experience of recording and analysing seals in a digital context which can be shared with the totality of the sigillographic research community in the UK. In contrast to many previous projects, SiMeW has not been restricted to a particular collection or repository, but has worked with material held by repositories ranging from local record offices to the British Library, and as such has an understanding of the challenge of merging sigillographic data from different institutions. Moreover, SiMeW has gathered material from a range of different types of collections, such as records of monastic houses and private estates, each with contrasting characteristics. Finally, SiMeW recorded seals from c.1150 to 1550, providing a remarkable overview of the surviving medieval material. All of these highly positive developments can be brought to the benefit of academic and non-academic end-users.

The proposed work for ExOMS will significantly extend the outreach of the current project and will do so by addressing a number of separate cohorts as well as discrete kinds of activity. The project team consider this to be an excellent opportunity to disseminate the original research beyond an academic community and ensure that the benefits of the research will reach a number of different end-users. With further funding through ExOMS, the current SiMeW team will reach out to the diverse community of academic researchers, heritage professionals, local and family historians, metal-detectorists, educationalists, businesses and living history enthusiasts that we know are keen to engage with sigillographic material. The follow-on funding will enable the team to foster interdisciplinary dialogue and offer the benefit of our experience working with this material in terms of technological and methodological solutions to the challenge of making sigillographic information available to the widest variety of users. In so doing, it is an aspiration of the project team that, just as with the original project which is identified as a model in sigillographic studies, the proposed project will offer a novel and important instance of the ways in which high-quality archival research and associated outputs can be employed in exciting and constructive ways in the wider community.

The project team anticipate that impact will be achieved through the following:

i. The proposed website content will be aimed at providing information and assistance to the widest possible range of users. This is intended to extend understanding within groups beyond academia of the value and potential of seals as a source for the study of medieval society, including local historians, conservators, archivists, and other interested individuals/groups, including any relevant commercial outlets. Content will include:

- A guide to describing seals, based on the SiMeW template and controlled vocabulary, and with images to assist with recording;
- Information on the ways in which seals can be used for a wide range of historical studies, with examples from the SiMeW project;
- Hyperlinks to other relevant materials/resources as part of an attempt to integrate approaches and share best practice.

Impact will be observable through uptake of relevant materials by interest groups, and through the use of resources made available on-line by the project, including a relevant taxonomy, and in associated further contact and outreach activities as developed and enhanced through that contact.

ii. In addition to the development of a point of contact and a node for the sharing of expertise and best practice, the other significant outputs of the project will relate to targeted engagement intended to foster awareness, understanding and informed use of this important resource, In terms of the present proposal and impact beyond academic institutions and their immediate partners, in three main areas: primary and secondary education, local history and heritage groups, business and commercial activity.

- Education: The SiMeW project is piloting approaches to engagement with primary school education (key stage 2) through dedicated workshops linked to its main exhibition at the National Library of Wales (NLW); the proposed follow-on funding project will seek to extend that contact and pursue ways of formalising that engagement by making its expertise and material available to curriculum designers and through an extension of its current activity with direct contact with schools, within Wales in this instance and through the creation of an activity pack pitched at appropriate curricula levels and devised in consultation with colleagues in education (including Aberyswyth University). Impact assessment: observable through evident use of SiMeW materials at teaching level and through more general and consistent adoption of relevant materials and approaches in relevant curricula.

- Local History and heritage contacts: the project team will contact and seek opportunities to attend and to present at a series of meeting that will both deepen and widen pre-existing contacts. Impact assessment: observable through engagement 'on the day' and in follow-up activity, including reference back to and further use of project material, notably material on-line.

- Commercial activity: An important aim of the proposed project is to explore opportunities for interface with business; the project team will engage with 'seals-kit' manufacturers and other heritage-related businesses with a view to adding their expertise into design and construction. Important in this will be an attempt to facilitate discussion between archives and manufacturers in ways that will promote economic opportunity within both the private and public sectors. In attempting this, the project team will work closely with Aberystwyth University's commercialisation and consultancy service with a view to developing such opportunities as well as pursuing the more general principle that such engagement is realisable for medievalists working with what are often perceived as quite remote and intractable sources. Impact assessment: observable through contact between commercial outlets and academic/archival 'providers', leading to successful and appropriate business opportunities.