The Reynolds Digital Research Resource; access to rich heritage science data in its multidisciplinary context and a template for future initiatives

The project will build a digital research resource collating a rich collection of technical data from examination of paintings by Joshua Reynolds over many decades. First president of the Royal Academy, he dominated eighteenth-century British art and was known for (sometimes problematic) experiments with painting materials, making a digital resource to access and share technical data on his materials and practices especially valuable both for research and conservation purposes. This idea arose from the urgent need to consult this data to inform conservation treatments of works by Reynolds, currently difficult as data is dispersed across institutions (even for individual paintings), not organised, available or easily findable. This consortium brings together institutions across the UK with both major holdings of works by Reynolds and extensive technical documentation from past research and conservation projects, as well as eminent Reynolds specialists. It includes National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Tate, Royal Museums Greenwich, National Museum Wales, Wallace Collection, Waddesdon Manor, English Heritage, National Trust, Courtauld Institute and Hamilton Kerr Institute; several of these also hold data on works in smaller institutions from past collaborations (eg Bristol Art Gallery, The Box Plymouth).

The resource will be built using ResearchSpace, a web-based open-source software platform, designed to promote "collaborative interdisciplinary research allowing people to grow knowledge" (https://researchspace.org/). It is not simply a data repository, but a curated data presentation and visualisation portal, allowing new insights, trends, connections and comparisons to be made from the aggregated data. It will capture deeper information and cross-section knowledge developed in the projects that generated the existing data, currently difficult to archive effectively in digital form. Beyond initial technical setup of the system, all collaborators will work to co-design the resource and the structure of the knowledge it will hold, led by user needs and the data itself. ResearchSpace is built on the concept of linked data. We will use existing domain-specific ontologies (such as the CIDOC-CRM; https://www.cidoc-crm.org/) and vocabularies to organise and connect our data collections into a re-usable citable digital resource. The complexity of this structure provides great flexibility, allowing collaborators to capture the nuance and context of their knowledge. It facilitates more varied and tailored searching options and development of more targeted data presentations, responding to researchers' needs. ResearchSpace provides the functionality to generate simple templates or form-based data management interfaces, making it easier for less technical users to enter and edit data. These allow the more complex semantic modelling details to be hidden beneath more traditional data-entry forms.

The final design or structure of the resource will emphasise the more generic issues of capturing Heritage and Heritage Science data from artworks, which will allow it to be an open-source re-usable 'container'/template for other data (same structure, metadata, image viewers etc) or for more general documentation activities. We will test this re-use concept with the Raphael Research Resource data (still active but in great need of updating (https://cima.ng-london.org.uk/documentation/), which is already mapped to the CIDOC-CRM. The long-term staff post, in addition to maintaining/extending the Reynolds resource (eg to include other British artists), would identify other valuable data collections to aggregate with the same approach and work with the wider Heritage Science documentation community to keep the project procedures, workflows and documentation up to date, to ensure the sustainability of the resource and the knowledge stored within it.