How do we make global majority histories and marginalised voices visible, in an ethical, inclusive and meaningful way, within and through our collections?
Background
Our next responsibility is to provide access: to “arrange that reasonable facilities are available to the public for inspecting and obtaining copies of those public records in the Public Record Office”. The nature of what this entails has evolved through time, and it now encompasses both physical and digital access to our collection. We believe that access should be global, for the many communities around the world represented within the record of the British state; and computational, to provide meaningful ‘big’ data for emerging technological approaches to the archive. We must become a ‘genuinely inclusive, collaborative and available national archive’.
This research theme captures our ambition to unlock our collections in new ways, for example through AI, optical character recognition (OCR) and handwritten text recognition (HTR); to foreground global majority voices in our collection and centre the communities represented therein, working in partnership with other global institutions; and, closer to home, to overcome the immediate challenges of hazardous materials in our collection and distributed data within our heritage science and conservation practice.
The above must be underpinned by a secure and sustainable digital estate, for our collection and research work, ensuring that every output we create is open, accessible and has a permanent digital legacy.
Next steps
Get in touch with research@nationalarchives.gov.uk
Source
This question was published as part of the set of ARIs in this document:
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Related UKRI funded projects
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Our Heritage, Our Stories: Linking and searching community-generated digital content to develop the people's national collection
The national collection is distributed throughout communities, localities, and national organisations. In the past two decades communities have adopted digital technologies to gather and record their collections in a for...
Funded by: SPF
Why might this be relevant?
The project aims to make global majority voices visible in the national collection through AI and digital tools.
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Indigenous Knowledges: a Digital Residency Exchange and Best Practices Pilot
The Indigenous Knowledges Digital Residency Exchange and Best Practice Pilot has significantly furthered conversation in the UK around the place of Indigenous Knowledge Protocols and Indigenous Research ethics in the dig...
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Why might this be relevant?
The project addresses the representation of Indigenous knowledges in digital spaces but does not focus on global majority histories.
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Community archives and identities: documenting and sustaining community heritage
This project will investigate the importance of community archives, and in particular the role of these archives in the production of community identity via academic and popular public histories, exhibitions and other in...
Funded by: AHRC
Why might this be relevant?
The project investigates community archives and their role in identity production, which partially aligns with the question.