Objects and knowledge from the UK’s world-class museums will soon be easier to find and work with, thanks to an ambitious collaboration between Art UK, Collections Trust and the University of Leicester. With generous funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, work has started on a new Museum Data Service that will launch in autumn 2023 and transform the way we all can work with these collections.
The service will pool millions of object records – decades’ worth of knowledge from UK institutions large and small – and share them as the raw material for countless public and research uses. The service will also provide high-level information about each collection.
The first major user of data from the new infrastructure will be Art UK, which already brings more than 300,000 artworks, from 3,400 collections, to an online audience of over 4.5m people a year. The Museum Data Service will allow Art UK to scale up its operation adding millions more artworks over time. Thanks to support from Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Digital Accelerator Programme, Art UK will also build a new state-of-the-art e-commerce platform to generate much-needed commercial income for its partner collections.
Collections Trust will use its longstanding relationship with hundreds of smaller museums to help them make the most of the new service, and broker data-based projects that demonstrate the Museum Data Service’s game-changing potential for the UK museum sector as a whole. The University of Leicester’s new Institute for Digital Culture completes the partnership, bringing a research dimension to the design and use of the service, the data expertise and technical capacity of a leading university, and a bridge to longer-term infrastructure ambitions for the wider digital humanities.
With guidance from the Open Data Institute on sustainable data stewardship, the three founding partners will set up a new joint organisation by spring 2024 to run the core service beyond the start-up phase and for decades to come. Until then Art UK, as the recipient of the two-year funding award from Bloomberg Philanthropies, will manage the grant. The governance structure for the Museum Data Service will be announced soon.
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