The ‘Sloane Lab’ is one of five ‘Discovery Projects’ of Towards a National Collection (TaNC), funded by the UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) Strategic Priorities Fund and delivered by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Awarded £3 million, the project, led by Professor Julianne Nyhan (UCL and TU Darmstadt), facilitated a research project partnership between UCL, TU Darmstadt, the British Museum and the Natural History Museum, London.  

The main aim of this project was to facilitate digital access to the historical and present-day information that describes the collections amassed in the eighteenth century by Hans Sloane (1660-1753). Sloane’s death in 1753 led to the establishment of the British Museum, the UK’s first national collection. The extensive collection includes natural history specimens, books, manuscripts and various objects gathered from the 1680s onwards and partly funded by the transatlantic trade in enslaved people and enslavement. Today it is spread across three institutions - the British Museum, Natural History Museum and the British Library - and the digital information that describes it is housed within five digital cataloguing systems that reflect the need of different disciplines and institutional histories. Because of these non-interoperable systems, anyone wanting to use or interrogate this collection is hampered by the inability to search across the collection. The Sloane Lab team worked to make searchable the records of the collection. 

At its core the Sloane Lab embraced a participatory methodology, aiming to ensure that the voices of knowledge communities outside of the university and heritage institutions would shape Sloane Lab and future digital collections. Practically, this started by asking potential users, audiences and interested community participants what they wanted to ask of a digital heritage collection. 

The project research developed new technologies, including the use of artificial intelligence (AI), to open the contents of museum and collections in ways that are more intuitive and relevant to the way the public and academics want to discover and use them. The Sloane collection serves as a microcosm of the challenges faced in integration of disparate data and mobilisation of historical datasets for facilitating access to extensive knowledge and information held in such a vast and varied collection.  The main output of the project is the Knowledge Base (KB), which provides a homogeneous data environment using formal semantics to allow data integration, semantic enrichment, and knowledge discovery across a disparate environment of resources. The journey of integrating Sloane’s historical catalogues and present-day cataloguing systems, was driven by insights from the participatory design process and contemporary understandings of cultural heritage collections that emphasise the needs and requirements of decolonised and multivocal heritage. This led to the acknowledgment of data absences, gaps in records, and the challenge of uniting a disparate collection to connect past and present. 

Initial analyses indicate that the project has engaged a wide audience, reaching at least c.1,290 to 3,120 individuals through co-design workshops, symposia, conferences, seminars, publications, and public events. Participants hail from a global network, including the UK, Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and Australia. Beyond direct partners like the British Museum and the Natural History Museum, the project has collaborated with an additional 23 partners across the cultural heritage and university sectors. The success of the Sloane Lab is rooted in long-standing partnerships and a commitment to interdisciplinary and trans-sectoral collaboration. 

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