“She is the best-documented of Victorian women, and possibly one of the best-documented Victorians full stop,” says Natasha McEnroe, the director of the Florence Nightingale Museum in London.
The museum is one of the key partners in a joint project that is bringing together the celebrated Nightingale’s correspondence into a shared digital portal: the Florence Nightingale Digitization Project.
“Nightingale was a very political and well-connected figure. She was also quite reclusive, so she wrote a lot,” says McEnroe. “The end result is that you have huge amounts of letters but in relatively small pots, dotted all over the globe. The only way to join them together is to do it digitally,” she says.
The museum holds about 1,000 of Nightingale’s letters, which is a
comparatively large collection but only represents a fraction of her output. It
received a Wellcome Trust grant to digitise the collection – a project that
started in 2012.
Shortly afterwards McEnroe instigated a partnership with the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University, which has a significant nursing archive. The resulting digitisation project is now led by the Howard Gotlieb Center, which has the technical capacity to manage and host the database and call on more resources.
The joint portal, which went live in 2014, currently includes collections
from 14 institutions, but there are plans for at least another 10 more to join,
including the Bodleian Library. The Royal College of Nursing and the Wellcome
Library are also closely involved with the project.
The list of organisations holding letters that could potentially contribute is “as long as your arm,” says McEnroe.
Even small collections can become significant parts of the database because
the correspondence they contain may prove to be the crucial link in a piece of
research, says McEnroe. “What’s really
nice is that everyone has equal weight,” she adds.
The project has not only made access easier for researchers, school pupils and family historians it has also brought together organisations with interests in areas such as nursing, medicine and women’s history. “It’s creating a community and a network that otherwise wouldn’t have happened,” says McEnroe.
The eventual aim is for the public to be able to contribute material to the archive. “I am keen to include the contributions of family historians, who often can make missing links, provide images and add letters,” she says.
Another shared catalogue is Art UK, which contains the vast majority of the
UK’s publicly owned oil paintings – from major galleries to hospitals and
schools.
Art UK began as the Public Catalogue Foundation, which took digital photos
of all of the UK’s publicly owned oil paintings for publication in print
catalogues, over the course of a decade.
In 2012, the images were put online as Your Paintings, which was part of the BBC website, and the content has now moved to its own site that went live earlier this year.
Camilla Stewart, the commercial partnerships manager at Art UK, says that the resource is a real help for museum professionals planning exhibitions. “If you want to put on a Joshua Reynolds exhibition, you can very easily pull up all of the Joshua Reynolds paintings in public collections in the UK, and find out where they are,” she says.
Art UK is free for the institutions whose works it represents, but they can pay an annual fee to become a partner and receive extra benefits. These include being able to upload other digitised artworks, and promote their exhibitions and events.
Soon, partners will also be able to be part of the Art UK shop, which is due
to launch as a pilot later this year and will involve about half a dozen
collections. Initially it will offer print-on-demand and image licensing
services, then at a later stage there are plans to allow partners to upload their
own merchandise.
Revenue will be shared between the institution and a commercial provider (Art UK will not take a cut). Institutions with their own shops will be able to link to those.
Stewart says that this opportunity has the potential to benefit regional collections in particular. “Large national institutions have been able to develop their own successful commercial offers,” she says. “But many regional collections are tied to local authority websites so they can’t access commercial benefits, and some are simply too small to make it a possibility.”
Shared catalogues have the potential to do more than simply bring data from
different sources together. Some are now making increasingly sophisticated
links between records.
Europeana is an aggregator of cultural records from countries across Europe, backed by the European Union. It works by collating data from different portals, including Culture Grid, which is managed by the Collections Trust.
Aubery Escande, who leads on Europeana’s project building and network of cultural professionals, says that the platform aims to provide “access to cultural content across Europe and across borders”.
This can be a complex matter because of different languages and data
formats, as well as copyright concerns. Europeana promotes the idea of linked
open data, a way of publishing data that allows connections between related
sources of information to be made.
“A museum may hold some content on a subject, but not all the information possible about it. Linked open data allows a user to access all the relevant information, to build their own corpus of information around their search,” says Escande.
A Europeana video gives the example of a person
typing “Venus” into a search engine looking for Boticelli’s painting, The Birth
of Venus.
It argues that linked open data could potentially help them find the painting more easily (instead of, say, the tennis player Venus Williams) as well as returning other relevant information, within the same web space.
This kind of capability remains an aspiration for linked open data rather than a present reality – its current uses are more modest. But Escande says that Europeana offers a platform for museums to share content in a trusted environment, where relevant legal and technical issues have been considered.
“What you see online may just be a painting, but behind the scenes you have all the metadata, all the work that has been done on copyright, on access, on interoperability and linked open data. All this is a massive asset to the participating partners,” he says.
The uncertainty of Brexit hangs over the kind of relationship that UK cultural institutions will have with Europeana in the future. However, Escande anticipates that it will continue in some form.
“Nobody knows the details at this stage, but in a web environment, you don’t work in silos. I can’t imagine that we would stop working with UK partners,” he says.