Alistair Hardaker
Three-year AHRC grant supports digital infrastructure connecting object records from museums across Britain for researchers and institutions.
The Museum Data Service has received three years of funding worth £800,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to continue developing digital infrastructure that connects object records across UK museums.
The joint venture between the University of Leicester, Art UK and Collections Trust aims to build a centralised catalogue that will ultimately contain data for 100 million object records. The service currently holds data for over six million objects drawn from more than 150 accredited museums.
The funding forms part of a new compute roadmap launched by the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology and UK Research and Innovation, which has confirmed over £59m of new investments into digital research infrastructure.
Dr Catherine Eagleton, chair of the Museum Data Service, said: “Since its launch in September 2024, MDS has already doubled the number of records available to 6 million and this support means we can continue to develop and grow, working closely with the other parts of the AHRC’s digital research infrastructure to revolutionise access to and research with collections.”
The Museum Data Service represents the second AHRC grant for the initiative, which launched in September 2024 following initial investment from Bloomberg Philanthropies. The three-year funding is being made available through the AHRC’s infrastructure for Digital Arts and Humanities programme, which supports the development of digital infrastructures for arts and humanities researchers.
Professor Ross Parry, Director of the Institute for Digital Culture at the University of Leicester, said: “We now look forward to working with all aspects of the AHRC’s research digital infrastructure development programme, in particular its new two-year investment into the N-RICH Prototype, and the on-going work of the network of five interconnected iDAH-funded data services of which MDS is part.”
The funding includes £2.2m to support the continuation of the infrastructure for Digital Arts and Humanities for a further three years. The programme includes a network of five interconnected data services that are developing innovative approaches to curation and enhanced access to complex data.”
