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Participation and Inclusion with Digital National Collections: Co-Designing the Sloane Lab

Terraciano, Alda; Flinn, Andrew; Nyhan, Julianne; (2024) Participation and Inclusion with Digital National Collections: Co-Designing the Sloane Lab. Mimesis Journal , 13 (2) , Article (DRHA). (In press).

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Abstract

The Sloane Lab: Looking Back to Build Shared Collections is a three-year discovery project (2021– 2024) of the Towards a National Collection program (TaNC), a major investment by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) using digital technology to create a unified national collection of the galleries, libraries, archives, and museums in the United Kingdom and open U.K. heritage to the world. 1 The Sloane Lab seeks to explore the potential and challenges of employing advanced computational technologies to unite the historical and present-day digital records of Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), a British physician, naturalist, and collector. The Sloane Collection was assembled by Sir Hans Sloane from around 1680. After his death in 1753, the collection was bought by the state on behalf of the nation and moved to a new institution, the British Museum, which was created for the purpose of making accessible to the public the vast number of objects he accumulated during his long life. 2 These were described by Sloane and his assistants across more than forty original manuscript catalogues, of which five “have been transcribed and made available online” (Sloane Lab 2022). The aim of the project is to employ advanced computational and digital-humanities approaches augmented by a participatory co-design methodology to reunite the collection records online for the first time and enrich debates on issues such as “imperialism, colonialism, slavery, loss, and destruction that have shaped the UK’s national collections until now” (Ibid.). As expected, multiple challenges face anyone seeking to access and use the collections across the different institutions where the objects were eventually distributed, namely, the Natural History Museum (NHM), the British Library (BL), and the British Museum (BM), each holding different parts of the original Sloane Collection. Notably, these challenges are not limited to the dispersal of the collection. They also relate to the objects’ provenance, attribution (Ortolja-Baird and Nyhan 2022) and more generally to the contested nature of the origins of the collection. As confirmed by historical research (Delbourgo 2018), Sir Hans Sloane benefited from the profits extracted from transatlantic enslavement and established trading routes and companies (such as the East India Company and the Hudson Bay Company) for the acquisition of these objects, including gains from investments in private companies, such as the Royal African Company, and profits from his wife Elizabeth Rose’s inherited plantations in Jamaica and associated forced labor of enslaved people (Ibid.). Considering the contested nature of the collection, the unacknowledged role of “countless people across the globe” (Ibid., 202) in its acquisition, and the inclusive aims of the project, the process of co-designing the Sloane’s aggregated digital collection requires an acknowledgment of the complexity of the field. This not only relates to the use of technological frameworks such as integrative framework (IF), persistent identifiers (PIDs), and Linked Open Data (Sung 2009; Ridpath 2022; Padfield 2020; Winters et al. 2022; Kotarski et al. 2022), or legal constraints connected to restrictive copyright frameworks for digital reuse of museum collections (Wallace 2022). “Soft factors” such as trust in technology, ethical policies, and incentives for participating in the production of a digital aggregator play an important role too.

Type: Article
Title: Participation and Inclusion with Digital National Collections: Co-Designing the Sloane Lab
Publisher version: https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/mimesis/index
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the author-accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Information Studies
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10199027
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