The UK’s galleries, libraries, archives and museums are building a unified national digital collection that links their scattered holdings into a single, searchable resource. This second phase of work takes the lessons from the earlier Towards a National Collection programme and turns them into a practical roadmap for the future. The core problem is that cultural heritage collections are currently fragmented across hundreds of institutions, each with its own digital system, making it difficult for researchers, educators, and the public to discover and use them together. If this succeeds, the UK will gain a scalable, national digital infrastructure—similar to what DiSSCo provides for scientific collections—that makes data from all these institutions findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. This is primarily an infrastructure and policy project, not a fundamental science investigation. Its impact will be felt in the quiet systems that underpin research, education, and public engagement: a researcher searching across museum, library, and archive records in one place, or a teacher pulling together objects from different collections for a lesson. The project’s value lies in making the nation’s collective cultural memory work as a coherent whole rather than a set of disconnected parts.
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Background Historic Environment Scotland was awarded a grant by AHRC to provide the programme directorate for the Strategic Priorities Fund programme, Towards a National Collection. Started in February 2020, the programme will complete its work in March 2025. The programme is led by Rebecca Bailey. By March 2025 the programme will have grant-funded eight Foundation Projects and three Covid-19 Projects (all complete), plus five large-scale Discovery Projects (completing between September 2024 and January 2025). In addition to the research, development and public programmes delivered by these projects, the programme directorate has commissioned a Digital Audit, three rounds of audience research, two copyright reports, two types of evaluation, two reports on Total Economic Value, and a comprehensive set of training materials. One of the most significant outputs of the programme, drawing on all of its research, will be set of policy recommendations on the development and management of digital collections in cultural heritage institutions, to be launched at the second programme conference in November 2024. The policy recommendations, which will inform and underpin this second phase of work, have benefitted from the advice of 50 culture sector, collection-holding, and funding organisations in two rounds of consultation. Purpose The purpose of this second phase of work is to build on what we have learned from the Towards a National Collection (TaNC) programme by developing, with the GLAM community, an inspirational roadmap for digital collections that embraces sustainability, long-term access and preservation, and recognises the community value of collections to build shared understandings. As with DiSSCo for scientific collections, there is an opportunity to design and create a scalable, national capacity that links and makes FAIR data from the collections of galleries, libraries, archives and museums. A significant proportion of the TaNC directorate will be retained for an additional 10 months (April 2025 - January 2026) to scope the post-TaNC landscape and determine, in consultation with the community, a range of options for the level and scope of future investment that is required to build the unified UK digital collection that TaNC envisaged. This programme of work will draw extensively on research funded and commissioned by the TaNC programme, as well as the context of existing or in-development AHRC infrastructures, and the AHRC's overall ambitions with respect to data and digital research, and infrastructure.
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