The Sloane Lab: History with innovation in shared collection development

This keynote explores the integration of Sir Hans Sloane’s historical catalogues with modern cataloguing systems, emphasising collections as data research and highlighting the participatory design process, which engaged expert communities to address complex issues surrounding Sloane’s collection. Central to this integration is the acknowledgement of data absences, gaps in records, and the challenge of uniting disparate datasets to connect past and present. The challenges of uniting disparate data and mobilising historical datasets for modern access are revealed, alongside the aims to decolonise and diversify heritage narratives by bridging humanities and technology. The Sloane Lab’s Knowledge Base plays a key role, extending CIDOC-CRM semantics to handle uncertainty, multivocality, and conflicting data, creating a homogeneous data environment, and enabling data integration, semantic enrichment, and comprehensive knowledge discovery. The presentation will highlight the technical and cultural challenges in aggregating and accessing the vast and varied Sloane collection. It reveals the connection between past and present through data and argues for the intersection of humanities and technology in managing and interpreting complex historical collections.