Open Standards Audit

Descriptions

Historic Environment Scotland has been awarded a grant from UK Research and Innovation, Arts and Humanities Research Council to lead and coordinate the Strategic Priorities Fund programme ‘Towards a National Collection – Opening UK Heritage to the World’. This tender is for carrying out an audit of tools and processes from Digital Humanities and Computer Science that are currently being used in the cultural heritage sector to facilitate digital research. In addition, this tender is looking to identify and map the audit results to the funders and Research Councils, as well as the university groups and research labs that contributed to the development of such tools and methods. The objectives of Towards a National Collection are: - to begin to dissolve barriers between different collections - to open up collections to new cross-disciplinary and cross-collection lines of research - to extend researcher and public access beyond the physical boundaries of their location - to benefit a diverse range of audiences - to be active and of benefit across the UK - to provide clear evidence and exemplars that support enhanced funding going forward Towards a National Collection aims to have a transformative impact on: - Digital search and cataloguing tools for collections, and related technologies and methodologies. - Research capability: through enhanced researcher access and new cross-collection search tools, researchers will be able to exploit the potential of the nation’s research assets in innovative ways, addressing radically new research questions and thereby maintaining UK global leadership in inter-disciplinary research. - Public access and public engagement with heritage: the programme will generate research-driven public-facing outputs, including major new exhibitions and immersive installations; extend public access beyond collections’ physical location, nationally and internationally; and facilitate wider and better-informed public engagement. The objective of this consultancy is to provide a detailed overview of the computational tools, software and methods from Computer Science and the Digital Humanities that have enabled digital research in the cultural sector, including galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM). This consultancy is aiming to map the funders and Research Councils, as well as the diverse universities, labs, institutes, and Independent Research Organisations, behind the tools and digital methodologies used to advance digital research in the cultural sector. The consultant should build on the findings of our Foundation and COVID-19 projects, as well as early findings by Discovery Projects. This consultancy will perform qualitative and quantitative analyses using techniques for data extraction (e.g. text mining), and analysis, (e.g. Natural Language Processing and Corpus Linguistics) from the Digital Humanities Quarterly publications, and the reports from UKRI Gateway to Research Portal, among others. It is not necessary for the consultant to provide recommendations or a reflective analysis, but the consultant will generate a report that maps relevant data, including name of tool or software, project, purpose, funding body, dates in use, projects or people using it, access, and pipelines. The description of these tools should identify how they operate and relate to the diverse sizes of cultural organisations, including small museums and community-led collections. The work can be carried out by individuals or teams, which can include junior researchers.