Launching N-RICH Digitisation Capability Pilot

A team from the University of Oxford, comprising experts from the Libraries, Museums, IT Services and Oxford e-Research Centre will be leading the Digital Capability Pilot of the new National Research Infrastructure for Cultural Heritage (N-RICH) Prototype project. N-RICH is a two-year initiative which represents a significant investment in the UK's renowned cultural heritage collections, made possible through funding from the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Infrastructure Fund Preliminary Activity grant awarded to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The project is being delivered by the Towards a National Collection (TaNC) programme in close collaboration with AHRC.

The Oxford team, working with the Open Preservation Foundation, will partner with colleagues from across the cultural heritage sector to design, test, cost and establish the priorities of a scalable methodology for digitisation across diverse cultural heritage collection types, drawing expertise, as well as recruiting partners, from the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) sector.
This project aims to ensure digital collections are able to be accessed computationally by researchers and will lay the groundwork for the N-RICH prototype to support GLAM organisations to provide their data to a wider research infrastructure that harnesses the power of collections as a national research resource. 

The Oxford team will be recruiting partner organisations to undertake paid work to test the new draft standard, they’ll also be engaging with the sector and will be releasing a survey to scope the needs of the sector in this space, as well as to identify barriers to participation. 

This work is not about creating a new metadata standard – we understand the GLAM sector is already working with discipline- and organisation-specific standards, and that no one has resource to re-catalogue their collection. This work will identify the minimum viable metadata and technical data needed to ensure computational access to a variety of collection types through mapping existing metadata and other cultural heritage standards. The resulting draft standard will be tested with range of partners, paid for their time on the project. A final draft will be published as an open-source standard.

The team from Oxford University includes digital collections and innovation specialists from the Bodleian Libraries, Ashmolean Museum and the Gardens, Libraries and Museums Division, and IT Services, as well as researchers with expertise in digital infrastructures and e-Research with GLAM collections. 

To find out more about the Digital Capability Pilot, contact the team on tdc@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.