Masters students announced as winners in innovative ideas competition

The team from the School of Museum Studies entered a proposed mobile app which creates an online crowdsourced archive and library to make documents more accessible to students, researchers and the wider public.

The app, called arHive: the collective archive, will help users take standardised high-quality scans of documents designed to support the digitisation process and to tie this wealth of digital content directly to the institution’s online presence. 

Successful entrants were given £2,000 and expert support to collaborate with industry exports and develop the ideas, along with a chance to win an additional £3,000 for further development. The students will also get a real taste of life in the cutting-edge world of technology start-ups, helping to develop employability skills like planning and pitching. On 23 August the winning teams will pitch their designs, and five ideas will be selected to be developed further.

Kate Crossley, a Master’s student in the School of Museum Studies, said: “We are delighted to be announced as one of the 15 winners of the JISC competition and feel that the arHive app and now in the process of perfecting our pitch on 23 August in order to secure further funding to develop arHive further.

“The openness, the ease of access, the emphasis on shared community knowledge and shared interests, can create a space where users can contribute their research photographs to a living library. This provides not just a library of digitised documents but the work and thoughts of the people behind them; a collective archive.”

A video of the students explaining the project is available at:

Watch a video about the School of Museum Studies here: