Project connecting digitally catalogued collections in UK museums receives three years’ funding worth £800,000
Objects from the catalogue: Left, Iron Age glass bead - Class 6 Oldbury Type; right, Dive Dynamics AH106 helmet - From the early days of commercial diving
A transformative service that aims to build a centralised catalogue of object records in museums across the UK has received funding as part of national investment in publicly accessible compute capacity.
The Museum Data Service (MDS), a spin-out joint venture between the University of Leicester and its partners Art UK and Collections Trust, has received three years of funding from the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), part of UK Research and Innovation. This generous grant will enable MDS to continue to develop its groundbreaking digital infrastructure for the benefit of researchers across the world and museums across the UK.
MDS is a transformative new service that aims to connect and share all the object records across all UK museums, providing the raw material for anyone who wants to work with this extraordinary wealth of knowledge. It now has data for over six million objects drawn from over 150 accredited museums and will ultimately show over 100 million object records.
As part of a new compute roadmap launched by the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), over £59 million of new investments have been confirmed into many areas of critical digital research infrastructure, including career development for digital research and technical professionals.
The funding includes £2.2 million to support the continuation of the infrastructure for Digital Arts and Humanities (iDAH) for a further three years. Embracing work on compute, skills and research software, the iDAH programme includes a network of five interconnected data services, which are pioneering innovative approaches to curation and enhanced access to complex data and driving technological innovation in AI and associated technologies.
The three-year funding for the Museums Data Service is being made available through the AHRC’s iDAH funding programme, supporting the development of digital infrastructures for arts & humanities researchers. This is the second AHRC grant for MDS, which was launched in September 2024 following an initial investment from Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Professor Ross Parry, Director of the Institute for Digital Culture at the University of Leicester, said: “The University of Leicester is proud to be one of the founding partners of the Museum Data Service, and we are enormously grateful to the AHRC for its continuing support. We now look forward to working with all aspects of the AHRC’s research digital infrastructure development programme, in particular its new two-year investment into the N-RICH Prototype, and the on-going work of the network of five interconnected iDAH-funded data services of which MDS is part.”
Dr Catherine Eagleton, Chair, Museum Data Service, said: “We are so grateful to AHRC for this funding, supporting our bold and ambitious goal for the Museum Data Service to bring together catalogue data from all of the UK’s museums, large and small. Since its launch in September 2024, MDS has already doubled the number of records available to 6 million and this support means we can continue to develop and grow, working closely with the other parts of the AHRC’s digital research infrastructure to revolutionise access to and research with collections.”
Dr Allan Sudlow, Director of Partnerships and Engagement at the AHRC, said: “AHRC is pleased to continue to support MDS which is enabling online discoverability of museum collections of all sizes, across all parts of the UK, for access and research. I look forward to the close coordination with other AHRC-UKRI digital infrastructure investments, particularly the National Research Infrastructure for Cultural Heritage (N-RICH). Through these collaborations we want to maximise the impact of UK cultural and heritage collections for research, society and the economy.”
- The funding for this on-going work of the Museum Data Service is at a cost of £800,765 (Full Economic Cost), with an Arts and Humanities Research Council contribution of £689,989.