Dr Mia Ridge, British Library’s digital curator for Western Heritage Collections, appointed to lead platform aggregating UK museum object records.
The Museum Data Service has appointed Dr Mia Ridge as head of service. Dr Ridge joins on secondment from the British Library, where she is digital curator for Western Heritage Collections.
Dr Ridge leads projects on computational research, AI, machine learning and crowdsourcing with cultural collections at the British Library. She was appointed Secretary to the Executive Board of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations in July 2024.
The Museum Data Service was launched 18 months ago at Bloomberg Philanthropies headquarters. The platform, funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council, is designed to aggregate over 100 million object records from 1,750 UK accredited museums and other collections over the next ten years. It currently shows 7.4 million object records from 207 accredited museums.
The service enables museums to upload and manage their object records whilst allowing users to search across multiple collections and databases. Institutional users include Art UK, which used the platform to triple the number of artworks on its site in 14 months, and the South West Collections Explorer, launched in late 2025. Collections Trust recently launched Find an Object, which imports data from the service.
The Museum Data Service is a collaboration between Art UK, Collections Trust, and the University of Leicester’s Institute for Digital Culture.
Dr Mia Ridge said: “It’s a privilege to take on the leadership of the Museum Data Service. I’m on record as a fan of the MDS – a service so simple and compelling in its vision to connect and share museum records across the UK that it’s hard to believe it hasn’t always existed.
“This appointment complements my work at the British Library, where I’ve had incredible opportunities to lead projects at the cutting edge of digital scholarship and collaborate with international experts in digital cultural heritage and the digital humanities.
Neil Fitzgerald, Head of Digital Research at the British Library, said: “The knowledge exchange between MDS and the Library through Dr Ridge’s expertise will further the development of the museum sector by expanding what’s possible when we scale access to information. We look forward to seeing how Dr Ridge will strengthen the capabilities of museum collection data during this secondment and thank MDS and its collaborative partners, Art UK, Collections Trust and the University of Leicester’s Institute for Digital Culture, for the opportunity.”
Dr Ridge previously worked at the Science Museum, where she led the release of over 200,000 collections records as open data.
She was Co-Investigator on Living with Machines, a £9.2m AHRC/UKRI project between the British Library and the Alan Turing Institute, where she led public engagement work with over 5,500 volunteers. She holds a PhD in Digital Humanities from the Open University.
