The Sloane Lab: Looking back to build future shared collections

How can museums, libraries, archives and galleries (GLAMs) use digital technology to link their collections together in ways that make it easier for different people, both specialists and interested publics, to find the information they want? How can digital technology help us tell new stories about what can be rediscovered, and reimagined, by linking collections? How can we make specialist users and members of the public more aware of the contested nature and histories of museum collections? What is the role of digital tools in foregrounding overlooked or hidden processes, like imperialism, colonialism, the slave trade, loss and destruction, that have shaped the national collection? Who gets to contribute to, and shape, research on how memory institutions can reach across their institutional boundaries, subject-specialities and even countries so as to better engage their varied audiences? And how can heritage institutions select the most useful technologies from the many that are available for digitizing, releasing and interlinking their collections? The founding collection of the British Museum is a rich area to explore these challenges, which are ones that many organizations face. This is because the Museum's original 1753 founding collection of Sir Hans Sloane is now split across three different institutions (the British Museum (BM), Natural History Museum (NHM) and the British Library (BL)) and the digital information that describes this founding collections sits in the different institutions in a range of different systems that are not currently set up to talk to one another. By focusing on catalogue records, and the vast, remaining collections of Sir Hans Sloane, this project will work with interested communities and heritage organisations to link the present with the past so as to allow the currently broken links between Sloane's collections and catalogues to be re-established across the NHM, BL, BM (plus others that have relevant material). The main outcome of our project will be a freely available, online digital lab (the Sloane Lab) that will offer researchers, curators and interested publics new opportunities to search, explore, and critically and creatively use and reuse digital cultural heritage. Crucially, we will involve a broad community of interested users in our future-making research on the national collection. We will invite expert and interested publics to contribute to all stages of the planning, research and implementation of our project through e.g. questionnaires, focus groups and interviews. One of the most exciting aspects of our participatory approach will be the 10 Community Fellows we will appoint through an open call. They will be given the funds and technical assistance they require to undertake a creative, research-led or practice-based project on the national collection using the Sloane Lab. Along with a dedicated traveling exhibition, and changes to the British Museum's Enlightenment Gallery, we will also support other memory institutions in the UK and internationally by releasing our code, tools and recommendations. Following ongoing consultation with them we will develop tailored demonstrators and recommendations that can facilitate their participation in the digital national collection. This project has the potential to allow the currently disjointed national collection to be interlinked, searched and researched in new ways that do not seek to hide or omit the contested nature of these collections. In doing so it will show that all "curious and interested persons", and not just curators, computer scientists and digital humanists, have important contributions to make to the future national collection.