Heritage Connector

As with almost all data, museum collection catalogues are largely unstructured, variable in consistency and overwhelmingly composed of thin records. This is largely a legacy of the development of these catalogues from handwritten paper records. The depth and form of collection catalogues has been primarily guided by collection management needs (records of acquisition, administration of loans, provenance documentation, etc.) where unstructured data can fulfil the needs of the organisation and comply with collection management standards. When computer technology was adopted for collection management in the 1980s it was implemented to handle these same back-office tasks rather than to support public access. The resulting form of the catalogues means that the potential for new forms of digital research, access and scholarly enquiry remain dormant, and searching across collections is currently possible only through aggregation which is labour intensive to implement, or by third-party search engines where results are unreliable. In this project, we will apply a battery of digital techniques to connect similar, identical and related items within and across collections. Our primary research question is "How can existing digital tools and methods be used to build relationships at scale between poorly and inconsistently catalogued digitised collection objects and other content sources?"

Since the turn of the twenty-first century enormous and growing volumes of material have been digitised, and catalogues have begun to address the needs of digital public access. However, this has been mainly at an institutional level or via a handful of content aggregators and thus the enhancement of catalogues for the purposes of public access has been driven by the needs of individual collection websites, with little or no interlinking to other collections or content sources. Where that linking (people, places, events, objects, etc.) does exist it has been undertaken by human intervention, and because of the number of records, it has been limited in scale and scope and rarely an ongoing endeavour despite the evolving nature of the catalogue.

Alongside the digitisation of collections, recent years have seen a growth in the publication online of scholarly research related to heritage collections: open access journals, theses, and other online resources. However, beyond the host institution, references to this material is rarely, if ever, ingested into the underlying collections systems and made available via links from related collection websites. This project will therefore also use computer analysis to attempt to identify and build links to this material. Finally, structured data and rich linking are an increasingly urgent concern as new forms of discovery and access emerge - notably artificial intelligence powered discovery and new interfaces such as voice search - that rely on these for their functionality.

This project will explore an alternative approach - a "Heritage Connection Engine" - that will analyse catalogues, published material and knowledge graphs, and build links at massive scale between these that can then be used for new forms of research. It will explore the opportunity for computer generated links with Wikidata to provide new levels of structure and machine-readable data that can form the foundation of new types of discovery and access. The "Heritage Connection Engine" will use a range of technologies including machine learning; named entity recognition; open data; and persistent IDs. These methods will create a large-scale data source of links, each with a confidence ranking. Computational enquiry to generated links via an application programming interface (API) will enable the creation of a range of proof-of-concept research and discovery tools. All software will be documented released under an open source Licence. All datasets will be released under the Creative Commons Zero license.

As a public-facing institution, Science Museum Group (SMG) will disseminate the results of Heritage Connector beyond the academy to broad publics through the development of a thoroughly integrated and cross-referenced digital catalogue. This resource will unite files from different museum holdings, producing more relevant search results from databases. Users will gain unprecedented access to museum collections and archives, enriching knowledge of Britain's past and legacy in the arts and sciences, with long-term value for materials in store and on display. Improved collections knowledge will inform future gallery and exhibition development plans.
VISITORS TO SMG: With improved access to museum collections and archive holdings, SMG will be able to transform its programme of cultural events, broadening its scope to include hitherto overlooked or neglected topics and objects. These initiatives will directly impact the experiences of SMG's 6 million annual visitors to our five national museum sites. Public events such as the two-day hackathon will provide further opportunities for a specific public to engage critically with project activities, and contribute to the research findings.
VISITORS TO UK HERITAGE ATTRACTIONS MORE BROADLY: The ability to discover related material across heritage organisations representing different disciplinary areas will lead to new and richer narratives, enhancing the interdisciplinary offer in displays and programming across organisations to the benefit of visitors who will be exposed to a new, wide, range of experiences.
MUSEUM & HERITAGE PROFESSIONALS: Museum and heritage professionals will benefit from our aim to transform digital cataloguing practices. The production of more thoroughly integrated and cross-referenced national museum records will directly benefit curatorial activities and perspectives. The end of project conference and publications will extend the findings of the project further, reaching colleagues across the world. Cross-institutional collaboration between SMG and the V&A will also foster long-term research partnerships and enrich knowledge of their shared history.
WEBSITE AND ONLINE RESOURCES: SMG's 11 million online visitors will have improved digital access to museum objects and records. Improved image libraries with links to contextual information will allow users to realise the full breadth of SMG's collection and engage with material typically unavailable to the public in galleries. Academic findings about the application of new software can impact other digital developers, online communities, and projects, exposing new theories and practices, and collaborative opportunities.
AMATEUR & PROFESSIONAL HISTORIANS: Planned events will foster dialogues between these groups. Improved access to objects and records will allow those researchers working outside the Academy to pursue sustained investigations into the material history of science, technology, engineering and medicine. Providing an open-access catalogue on a digital platform ensures that all types of researchers regardless of their socio-economic background or location can use museum materials.
LIBRARIANS AND ARCHIVISTS: The impact on librarians and archivists will be in the form of knowledge exchange between them and project investigators. Archivists and librarians from across the country will be invited to convenings, allowing them to benefit from the expertise of Heritage Connector's investigator team, who will in turn benefit from improved knowledge of collections. Participants in the project will help librarians and archivists consider the relevance of these new digital tools for their collections, and how scholars and the wider public might use these digitally revamped collections for research activities.