Projects

The UCL Research Institute for Collections will support researchers of all levels and disciplines to engage with our exceptional archive, rare book and museum collections.

Person using virtual reality headset, stood in the UCL Flaxman Gallery

360VR Exhibitions

Virtual Reality (VR) in museums is the focus of a newly funded knowledge exchange project that brings together UCL Art Collections, UCL's Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) and AI technology start-up Kagenova, which was founded by UCL scientists.

Tseng Yu, Illustration for Andre Gide's 'Fruit of the Earth', 1956

Transnational Slade

UCL Art Collections is embedded in Transnational Slade research project with Paul Mellon Centre and features student work from a lockdown print collaboration between Slade and National College of the Arts (NCA), Lahore, Pakistan as part of Testing Ground exhibition.

John Linnell, View Across the Fiord from Herrinsholmen, c.1834

Languages and Cultures: Nordic Fragments

UCL Art Collections is collaborating with Dr Elettra Carbone, School of European Languages and Cultures (SELCS). The collections feature in an online exhibition Nordic Fragments exploring British-Nordic connections, and her forthcoming British Representations of Modern Scandinavia: An object-based investigation (UCL Press).

The Languages and Cultures Show and Tell

UCL Art Collections is at the heart of The Languages and Cultures Show and Tell, a self-directed online course made up of a series of short taster videos and related activities showcasing one or more aspects of some of the languages and cultures taught at the School of European Languages, Culture and Society (SELCS) at UCL.

Survey of London Project promotional material. Aerial photo of the River Thames.

UCL and Survey of London

UCL Art Collections is contributing to research underway by Dr Amy Spencer in the Survey of London, based at the Bartlett School of Architecture, towards a monograph on UCL’s Bloomsbury campus set to be published to mark UCL’s bicentenary in 2026.

Optical Coherence Tomography of Euclid’s Elements

Collaboration between UCL Digitisation Suite and UCL Special Collections

UCL Special Collections has worked together with the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities on several projects, testing new advanced imaging techniques on real historical objects and using imaging to answer questions posed by librarians and conservators in Special Collections.

Liberating the Collections

UCL Special Collections is running a project that trains volunteers to search the catalogue for printed items relating to marginalised groups. Outputs have included articles on women book owners, women in the Italian book trade, and early modern women writers.

Online Comparative Bibliography

UCL Special Collections has organised events that virtually unite items from different collections, encouraging new research avenues and the exchange of curatorial expertise. In May 2021, an event we organised compared 17 copies of a 1481 edition of Dante's.

Automated Copyright and Due Diligence for Archive Collections

Funded by the TNA Archives Testbed Fund, this project is a collaboration between the Art Museum and Special Collections. It explores whether automated copyright permission systems being designed and trialled by the museum can be expanded to automate and streamline the due diligence process for third-party copyright in archive collections and manage the resulting documentation more effectively. The final report is currently being written and we are exploring future phases with UCL Advanced Computing Research Centre.