The symposium on Connecting, co-designing and engaging with digital collections and infrastructures on 6-7 September

On 6-7 September, HDSM was local host of the Sloane Lab Knowledge Exchange Event (Europe): “Connecting, co-designing and engaging with digital collections and infrastructures: challenges and case studies”.

The symposium took place at the Hessisches Landesarchiv-Staatsarchiv Darmstadt. We welcomed an international audience of researchers, museum professionals, archivists, librarians, technologists, and students interested in the intersections of Digital Humanities, Digital History, and Digital Heritage.

The event explored the state of the art of how digital collections and infrastructures can be  connected, co-designed, and engaged with, including the ethical, creative and human-centred challenges that can arise in digital contexts. The themes of papers covered diverse topics including semantic web and data-driven methods for connecting and researching digital collections; human-centred, ethical and interdisciplinary approaches to linking past and present collections; creative and knowledge-led engagements with digital collections; and future directions.

The symposium finished with a discussion that explored the interests and needs of cultural heritage institutions in collections as data infrastructure projects. The Sloane Lab has already carried out similar surveys with the UK heritage sector. By carrying out this focus group the Sloane Lab will be able to build a picture of the status quo in German-speaking regions and bring this into conversations with the findings of the UK study.

The event was funded by the Towards a National Collection Programme of the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of the work of the “Sloane Lab: Looking back to build future shared collections”, a collaboration between University College London (UCL) and TU Darmstadt, the British Museum, the Natural History museum, working also with a number of heritage institutions and participatory communities across the British Isles