The Staff Exchanges in European Cultural Heritage Trusts (SEECHT) project offers opportunities for professionals from within the National Trust movement to share their learning and contribute to a more open and welcoming European heritage sector. The project delivers a system of secondments for Europe's future leaders of heritage trusts, offering on-the-job training by shadowing their contemporaries in other European contexts. Having learnt from their neighbouring trusts, participants will deliver projects that broaden access to all segments of the European public, whilst also welcoming members of heritage trusts from other countries as part of the reciprocal visiting programme. A toolkit, to be shared widely among European heritage organisations and policy makers, will capture the incredible strength of variety possessed by European heritage trusts, and provide the blueprint for continued collaboration between project participants.

Iona, although a small island off the larger island of Mull, off the west coast of Scotland, has one of the oldest, richest, and most complex place-name records in Britain and Ireland. It also has a complex modern landscape as a result of multiple user-groups interacting with the landscape of the past in different ways. This project interrogates the dynamics of the namescape (the historical and changing landscape of names) of Iona and its environs, shedding light on the past, and proposing new ways of curating place-names as part of heritage management. The 'Life of Saint Columba' written around AD 700 by Adomnán, the ninth abbot of the monastery of Iona, gives our earliest detailed impressions of this landscape, including some of our earliest recorded Gaelic place-names in Britain or Ireland. In the modern period the island became a destination for tourists and antiquarians, who interacted simultaneously with older texts and traditions and with the landscape and monuments they found, creating, curating and reinvigorating names. In the past century a traditional Gaelic crofting community has evolved into a more mixed economy, with a greater range of year-round occupations, augmented by seasonal auxiliary staff and faith-tourists. Permanent organisations, e.g., the National Trust for Scotland and Historic Environment Scotland now have differing management responsibilities towards the built and natural environments of the island, joining the international faith group, the Iona Community. This has created a complex dynamic of new names, translated names, and forgotten names, in Gaelic and English, a contested landscape of heritage and naming. These place-names (settlement names, landscape and coastal features, monuments) have never been subjected to formal rigorous analysis, despite the fragility of many of the names used by the Gaelic-speaking community in recent times. That fragility (highlighted by recent deaths) makes it vital that we subject this namescape to a programme of rigorous research, publication, curation and dissemination to the public and to official public bodies, and that we do it now. The team we have assembled for this purpose represents cumulative and long-standing expertise on Iona's history and heritage, on place-names and place-name survey, and on Gaelic and history in the adjacent island of Mull. In assembling this team at this time, the project is of utmost timeliness. The core tasks of the project will be to research in-depth the place-names of Iona, to make that research widely available to the public through an online resource, and to bring them to publication in a volume of the Survey of Scottish Place-Names. Because of its long-standing links to Iona, this will also include the place-names of the nearby small uninhabited island of Staffa, also managed by NTS. The research will involve an in-depth investigation of the earliest records of Iona and its landscape, as well as work with modern recordings of Gaelic place-names, and new fieldwork into contemporary usage among the various communities who inhabit and work on Iona. The research will be set against the context of the neighbouring island of Mull, examining how Iona may share features with or differ from its environs. Our work on the concerns of curating heritage place-names will be explored in an international conference on 'Authority and Authenticity', with subsequent essay collection. We will engage fully with a variety of beneficiaries from the project, producing a number of key ancillary outputs designed for the public and for the aid of heritage management: an interactive website allowing exploration of the names and the landscape; a popular guide to the place-names; standardised lists of names. We will further engage with the public and with heritage management bodies via a variety of events, including workshops, and a conference in 2021, the 1500th anniversary of the traditional date of the birth of Iona's founder, St Columba

These equipment upgrades will improve and enhance Historic Environment Scotland's (HES) core functions in investigating, caring for and promoting Scotland's historic environment, both in terms of managing our in-house collections and also underpinning our wider engagement and support across the sector. Our historic environment is a sophisticated assemblage of historic buildings and structures, archaeological sites, monuments and landscapes which, together with object collections and archives, make up a unique and interconnected resource, collectively documenting over 5000 years of human history. Through upgrades to key pieces of equipment - spanning across material science, 3D digital documentation and visualisation, remote survey and applied object conservation - our ability to apply science to culture to better understand and safeguard our national collections will be enhanced, increasing wider benefits through sharing of information and promoting additional collaborative research with a range of partners and stakeholders. The targeted investment is particularly timely because climate change is resulting in unprecedented impacts on our historic environment, significantly increasing the threats to its preservation. Increased frequency and severity of extreme weather events and the acceleration of coastal erosion are threatening iconic sites, requiring better understanding of impacts and adaptive actions. Tackling the causes of climate change also requires unprecedented levels of intervention to buildings to support emissions reduction and decarbonisation. To address these issues, HES recently launched a new and ambitious Climate Action Plan to set out our priorities for understanding and adapting to the challenges of climate change. Research and innovation is one of four cross-cutting priorities helping to support delivery of this plan. By allowing us to create richer datasets and helping to make information more widely available in more accessible formats and in greater quantity, this investment will transform our use of digital resources to support ourselves and others to make better informed choices about how we look after our cultural heritage for future generations. The investment will result in practical benefits to HES, our partners, and wider stakeholders. It will produce efficiencies and significant cost savings as well as the provision of new quality, multi-purpose data, which will support us and other asset managers to devise more effective interventions to maintain and adapt the historic environment to maximise benefits whilst retaining cultural value. This increased capability will support new research and innovation and increase access and engagement, including reaching new audiences and development of resources for education and training. We will also support new economic opportunities by informing planning and development, and supporting resource efficiency and the sustainable re-use of historic assets through, for example, provision of improved information to support energy efficiency retrofit of existing buildings, currently a major strand of economic recovery programmes. The upgraded equipment will also support research and skills development in heritage management and conservation. It will support the work and development of our in-house trainees, collaborative PhD students and junior researchers, and underpin national and international partnerships. This will help to ensure that the next generation of researchers and heritage professionals have the skills necessary to tackle contemporary challenges. Through the investment and the enhanced capability it will deliver, we will build on our strong reputation for excellence and innovative cross-disciplinary partnership approaches to research, and increase our support for others by providing a national-scale resource for collaboration, education and training.

The central focus of this research is producing reliable, accessible and scholarly reading texts of Robert Burns for both the academic and general reader in the 21st Century, specifically Burns's Poetry and Correspondence. The Poetry has not been freshly edited in complete form since the 1960s, and the present edition will take advantage of around 75 new manuscript and 55 new print material discoveries. The two volumes of 'Poetry' will also include a proportion of 'Song' texts, which have been presented and read, historically, as 'Poetry' texts. Much will be made in the descriptive apparatuses and criticism produced by the 'Poetry' part of the project of 'Burns Song as Poetry'. Similarly, the Correspondence will capitalise upon around 100 new manuscript and 60 new print material discoveries. These three volumes of letters will also be the first time ever that there has been an edition of any kind, let alone a scholarly one, that brings together both sides of Burns's correspondence in its fully extant form. Correspondence to Burns has either never been published previously (about 50 per cent of this material), or it has been badly edited and often bowdlerized in print. As well as attempting to produce as complete and helpful a reading experience as possible through the application of modern textual editing techniques and providing explanatory annotation (of historical matters, the Scots language and other biographical and cultural information), 'Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century: Poetry and Correspondence' also allows a 'behind the scenes' or 'hands on' approach for the reader who desires it. This will occur through four substantial online workshops on the editing of Burns, including the large hinterland of forged and facsimile material sometimes mistaken for the real thing. Editorial possibilities and choices are explained for the editing of Burns song, poetry and correspondence (the material for the first among these three drawn from the AHRC-funded 'Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century', 2011-16, and the resultant Oxford University Press volumes published, or to be published - 2014, 2016 and 2018). These workshops are intended to be accessible to the generally interested 'layperson' as well as providing insight for other scholars and also archivists, curators, librarians and rare book and manuscript dealers, all of whom make up the substantial Robert Burns area of the Cultural Heritage sector. This online material will also be directly related to the 'Introductions on the Text' sections of each of the new OUP volumes. Similarly, and with additional benefits to the Burns Tourist sector, the interactive map of Burns's correspondents and their locations provides an accessible and path-breaking mapping of Burns's social, cultural and intellectual networks during the late eighteenth century. The research for 'Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century: Correspondence and Poetry' will also be showcased in public-facing workshops at four different geographical locations where there are holdings of Burns manuscripts: Alloway, Dumfries, Edinburgh and Irvine. Likewise three articles in peer-reviewed journals will also be of specialist editing interest to the academic community.

Core Research Question: How successful have approaches to immersive technologies at major heritage sites in Scotland been currently, both in terms of outcomes against business plan expectations and in terms of visitor response, and what kinds of future development are supported by the evidence? Research Methods: The proposed Research Methods in this initial pilot phase will lay the groundwork for the exploration of the effectiveness and potential of the core Immersive Technology Research Question. Under the guidance of the PI and research team, the pilot project RA will set up a questionnaire to test visitor response to the immersive dimensions of the Culloden, Robert Burns Museum and Bannockburn sites, as well as at the Riverside Museum in Glasgow (which has secured one of the highest -if not the highest-non-traditional museum audience in the UK) and the National Library of Scotland at Kelvin Hall. In parallel, they will set up observations and a focus group round the proposed collections and policy developments at Newhailes by the National Trust for Scotland. These approaches will follow the methodology used by the PI's CDA to evaluate audience response among the 60 000 visitors to the When Glasgow Flourished exhibition in 2014 and by the PI's Beyond Text RA to evaluate responses to the material Burns January exhibition in the Mitchell Library, Glasgow in 2010 and 2011; and by the CI Economou's RA in three different immersive exhibitions in Rome, Athens, and Ename as part of the Marie Curie CHIRON project between 2005-2008 (Economou & Pujol Tost 2011). The project team will identify audience focus groups from the existing visitor and client contact base of the partner organizations, and will explore their visitor experience while also exposing them to new developments in Immersive Experience technology. Consideration will be given to the development of future 'Smart' response evaluations, such as Fitbit and smartphone visitor response monitoring. Immersive experiences are means of 'composing' memory (that is, creating the conditions in which the memories which are publicly expressed are those which are formulated within a range of socially acceptable contexts. In the motorized era, trails have fulfilled the same function of embedding preferred memory narratives, while immersive experiences-delivered in part or whole through the medium of technology-strive to present a fusion of memory, place and performance to create a close and lasting relationship of visitor memory to the experience purchased by the visit. Immersive technologies have (although research on this is not yet developed and its development is a key component of the proposed partnership) arguably similar effects to electronic mass media in the composure of memory, but effects which are possibly delivered in stronger and more lasting terms. We will also work with Soluis as our digital partner, to create a decision-making model for policy and audience development. Research Context: The research context is that of both the recent rapid growth of the heritage sector, and within that the centrality of cutting edge immersive experiences for tourism, the heritage industry and audience development The development of immersive experiences at 'fantasy' venues such as the London, York, Blackpool and Edinburgh 'Dungeons' from Merlin Entertainments is a connected activity. Some of these visitor experiences are relatively recent, and audience feedback is at an early stage: however, there is some evidence that fully or predominantly CGI immersive experiences such as Bannockburn are less appealing and effective to a comprehensive audience demographic than they are to particular groups. Research Outputs: Website, a policy paper, a risk assessment, a visualization decision making tool and presentations at the AHRC Showcase, and connected events-e.g. presentations at DH conferences and a media/social media strategy.