The British Library holds in its custodianship a vast collection of manuscripts and printed books from China and Central Asia that was gathered by Sir Marc Aurel Stein and other explorers in the early 20th century. This outstanding collection contains over 45,000 items written on paper, wood and other materials in many languages spoken in China and Central Asia. Since 1994, the British Library has played a leading role in the development of the International Dunhuang Project (IDP), a large-scale international network connecting partner institutions in Europe, Asia and the US holding collections related to Dunhuang and other Silk Road sites. All partners share the vision of making the images and metadata related to the collections under their custodianship fully and freely available online. This is made possible through the IDP website, a digital platform which is powered by the IDP database, provided by 4D. The 4D database operates across seven synchronised servers that are located at the British Library and the National Library of China, the Dunhuang Academy, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts in St Petersburg, Ryukoku University and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. This system relies on a sharing mechanism that allows access to images and data of the collections, whilst ensuring that each institution retains full ownership of their high resolution images. In turn, it enables a wide range of users of the IDP website to access and explore collections across the IDP network. This repository is an essential tool for researchers, professionals and students across the world working on Buddhist studies, Silk Road studies and Asian manuscripts. The Library has initiated the urgent upgrade of the IDP database across all the seven linked servers to ensure stabilisation and access by staff and external users for at least the coming 2-3 years, and full synchronisation of the system. The AHRC investment will provide the hardware upgrades necessary for this work, enabling the British Library to replace the existing IDP workstations with new machines, which will support the new IDP database in 2021, and the existing data storage units that have come to the end of their lifecycle with expanded and updated ones. This equipment is essential to British Library staff and research fellows working on the Stein and other collections uploaded in the IDP database. This work will ensure the sustainability of the IDP activities for the years ahead, the safe running of core operations, and access by staff and external users to the metadata and images held in separate institutions.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

The British Library's Shared Repository Service was developed to support cultural heritage organisations in sharing their data and opening up their research. Piloted through 2018-2021, and supported with initial AHRC iDAH funding in 2021, it has continued to bring iDAH further towards inclusion of heritage and IRO research. Developments in the previous 12 months have improved functionality for users, branding options for partners, and metadata. During that period, conversations with other IROs about future use of the shared repository and bringing their research into the platform have brought them closer towards on boarding, and our interviews to understand how to meet needs beyond the IRO Consortium have identified the next steps to further strengthen open data and scholarship across UK heritage research. Now IROs understand the future of iDAH, more organisations are keen to move towards set up. Further effort is now required over the next 12 months to continue improving the repository service, ramp up the inclusion of partner organisations and deliver vital skills development to IRO colleagues in support of increased use of repository services, and key competencies for open scholarship. The Shared Repository Service will allow for adherence to Open Access and data sharing mandates, while providing institution-specific front-end repositories to heritage organisations with nationally- and internationally-recognised brands, allowing partners to showcase the research produced by their expert staff. This research is produced through business-as-usual activity, as well as from collaborative research projects, and other activity such as artist in residence programmes. The British Library's Shared Repository Service aggregates that research content across partners to make participation a collective activity that increases the visibility of heritage research from across the UK. This creates a scaling of benefits while allowing a maintenance of organisational branding and impact.

This project will help cultural heritage organisations to use geospatial data - references and representations of location, such as where objects were made and used or the places they depict and describe - to connect diverse collections and engage research and public audiences in new ways. Through scoping, workshops and audience research the project will establish best practice and provide technical recommendations for the development of a national discovery system whereby objects about a topic of interest can be readily discovered from a variety of sources, represented in the context of their historic environment, and referenced in time and landscape. At present, discovering collections across multiple institutions and collections can be problematic in terms of user experience, requiring complex text-box searches or commercial search engines. However, in the field of Classics, The Pelagios Network of researchers, scientists and curators has developed a methodology that uses gazetteer referencing to link research data across diverse collections with considerable success, building a community of partners and stimulating new research perspectives. Similarly, the Collections Trust's prototype aggregator demonstrates that searching across cultural heritage collections using geographic location is feasible. This project builds on these methods, scoping improvements to the aggregator's results and exploring ways to present location in an accessible and meaningful form for public consumption. A key question is how the place-based Pelagios methodology can best be integrated with space-based cultural heritage data resources brought together by the Collections Trust aggregator. To test and scope this ambition, participating organisations will work on a set of thematic and technological case studies that will test the technical feasibility and appeal of the approach to potential users, ultimately developing an understanding of scalability. The project aims to understand the requirements of stakeholders, institutional, academic and public, in order to inform content selection, technical decisions and maximise impact. It will investigate how we can use location to build a common infrastructure that links collections and render this content accessible and meaningful to different audiences. The objective is to understand the technical components required, the current and potential options available and to make recommendations for potential solutions, all of which will be described in the project report. The report will constitute a strategy, offering pathways for progress and outlining potential barriers to inform developments in the next phase of Towards a National Collection and across the cultural heritage sector more broadly. It will encourage cultural heritage organisations to take up a common geospatial approach and will provide a roadmap to enable diverse organisations to enrich their metadata and expose this in a consistent and joined-up way. Pelagios has had success with a decentralised, 'opt-in' model of partner engagement. Our project will explore whether distributed or centralised models of integration and cooperation are relevant to the integration of cultural heritage organisations. It will develop understanding within the cultural heritage sector of how location-based interfaces can be used to make collections meaningful, spear-heading a movement beyond text-based searches in the discovery of content. Location offers an exemplar, offering a common thread from which we can learn about wider opportunities in connecting collections using other commonalities such as person, time or subject.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.