The Sloane Lab

The Sloane Lab: Looking back to build future shared collections (October 2021 – September 2024)

PI: Professor Julianne Nyhan, University College London and TU Darmstadt

Co-Is: University College London, The British Museum, & The Natural History Museum

Partner organisations: British Library, Historic Environment Scotland, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, National Museums of Scotland, Archives and Records Association, Collecting the West project funded by the Australian Research Council, Down County Museum, National Galleries of Scotland, Oxford University Herbaria & metaphacts

The founding collection of the British Museum is a rich area to explore how we can reconnect dispersed heritage connections using state of the art technologies. This is because the British Museum's original 1753 founding collection of Sir Hans Sloane is now split across three different institutions (the British Museum, Natural History Museum and the British Library) and the digital information that describes this founding collection sits in the different institutions in a range of different systems that are not currently set up to talk to one another. By focusing on catalogue records, and the vast, remaining collections of Sir Hans Sloane, the Sloane Lab project is researching how we can work with interested communities and heritage organisations to link the present with the past so as to allow the currently broken links between Sloane's collections and catalogues to be re-established across the Natural History Museum, British Library and British Museum (plus others that have relevant material).

The main outcome of our project is a freely available, online digital lab, the Sloane Lab Knowledge Base, that offers researchers, curators and the interested public new opportunities to search, explore, and critically and creatively use and reuse digital cultural heritage.