The Heritage Science Data Service (HSDS) will provide key Digital Research Services enabling RICHeS to transform heritage science and conservation research (HSCR) and its capacity to advance understanding, preservation and management of UK heritage. It will offer a single discovery point to distributed facilities, cross-disciplinary expertise, and shared data as a research resource. This new co-ordinated approach brings considerable advantages, enabling international leadership and open innovation, including advances in AI and data science. Heritage science and conservation research has significant digital infrastructure requirements. It employs a broad range of technologies including: digital imaging (3D laser scanning, photogrammetry, X-ray, infrared, hyperspectral, XRF scanning etc), remote sensing (LiDAR, geophysics), 3D modelling, dating (dendrochronology, C14), many analytical approaches, non-invasive or on samples (stable isotopes, Ancient DNA, Zooms, SEM-EDX, FTIR, GC-MS, HPLC etc) and large-scale facilities (neutron, synchrotron). Many complementary methods are used in tandem, generating numerous datasets (routinely at gigabyte scale) requiring active data management to ensure long-term preservation and re-use. They are a primary resource, generally born-digital without paper surrogates. If lost they cannot be reacquired; it is essential they are managed and curated according to the FAIR principles. The HSDS will curate a substantial body of new data across RICHeS and be the national discovery tool for UK heritage science. Easier access to this difficult-to-find data through digital services unlocks its potential for research and wider impact in the heritage sector and beyond. It will be a digital skills development incubator, with an interoperable distributed structure on an unprecedented, transformative scale. It will widen access to advanced scientific research facilities for arts and humanities, heritage and archaeological professionals, researchers, engineers and scientists, through: (i) a catalogue of research facilities, reference collections and expertise; (ii) an aggregating function, making data collections navigable and searchable; (iii) a FAIR repository for research data, encouraging Access and Re-use. HSDS will be developed and managed by the Archaeology Data Service (ADS), an innovative CoreTrustSeal repository managing archaeological and heritage science data since 1996, in partnership with the STFC Hartree Centre, a high-performance computing, data analytics and AI research facility, formed in 2012. HSDS also brings together key UK heritage bodies covering England, Scotland and Wales. As initial data providers with associated digital expertise, they enable a 'design with data' approach, with sector coverage complementing ADS, and include the British Museum (BM), British Geological Survey (BGS), National Gallery (NG), The National Archives (TNA), Natural History Museum (NHM), Historic England (HE), Historic Environment Scotland (HES) and Museum Wales (NMW). Collaboration with the Museum Data Service (MDS) will ensure interoperability with metadata drawn from smaller museums. Cascading grants will provide crucial support for additional partners and wider coverage of user-needs, also fostering co-development of Virtual Research Environments for visualising and interrogating. Internationally, HSDS will provide the UK DIGILAB hub for E-RIHS (European Research Infrastructure for Heritage Science), and will work with the Getty Conservation Institute to integrate data from laboratories using their Arches for Science platform. NG and TNA will work with Kartography to integrate data through the ResearchSpace platform.

Traditionally, printed labels and information panels have been the principal means by which museums have explained their exhibits and told their stories. \n\nThis orthodoxy of 'labelling' owes much to the emblematic visual technologies of the Renaissance as well the classificatory systems of the Enlightenment - the historic moments when the idea of 'museum' was forged. The label, therefore, has become (and remains) a defining characteristic of the museum, and entrenched as much in visitor expectation as in curatorial practice.\n\nAlthough digital information technology is now widely used in museums and galleries, labels and information panels are generally printed, possibly because the range of available materials for the task - typically paper, plastic, composites, paint ... do not permit updating without much effort and expense. \n\nIn 2006 the Department of Museum Studies, at the University of Leicester, received HEROBC (HEFCE) funding to develop and test flat, wireless, updateable, prototype digital labels for exhibitions - labels that looked like labels but could show 'live' content generated either by curators or visitors, triggered either by news, latest research, or the nature of the visiting group, or simply the time of day. This original small-scale pilot research considered the prospect (and the challenge) of a gallery of labels that were as adaptable (and 'live') as the content of our museum websites (Parry, Ortiz-Williams and Sawyer, 2007).\n\nThis work highlighted a range of issues:\n- visitor interactions raised a range of questions about the use of digital signage\n- curators took different approaches to using digital signage\n- stable WiFi connectivity was challenging\n- the hardware (LCD screens) presented some difficulties\n- in practices, integration with wider IT systems would be significant\n\nSince the original research, there have been many changes:\n- museum staff are increasingly aware of digital media\n- new WiFi standards have emerged\n- complementary technologies (RFID) are now more common\n- electronic paper is on the cusp of viability\n- the retail sector is showing increasing interest in digital signage.\n\nThe LIVE!Museum research network will - as a starting point - review the original research in the light of these changes and identify key areas for further research, development and knowledge exchange. These might include:\n\n- what are the implications of live digital content and media for the visitor?\n- what are the implications for exhibition design and maintenance?\n- what are the implications for curatorial practice and authorship?\n- what are the implications for associated IT systems?\n- and what can we learn from other sectors, especially retail?\n\nLIVE!Museum builds upon this initial work - but with more intellectual depth, more mindful of the substantial technological advances taking place, involving a broader range of partners, within a wider curatorial context of in-gallery 'live' provision, and with a more circumspect and strategic eye on what the sector needs and what visitors expect.\n

This proposal responds to challenges faced by smaller museums struggling to engage online with audiences during varying levels of lockdown, and beyond. Problems include: low levels of basic digital literacy; poor understanding of audiences (including those with specific access needs); uncertainty over how to transfer real-world interpretive practice to the digital realm; lack of guidance about technical solutions; barriers to future-proofing digital assets in line with the FAIR data principles (data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable); and shoestring budgets. The project will create a community of practice that will (through sector-wide dissemination) extend beyond the immediate participants to museums across the UK. The core cohort will receive training, mentoring and technical support to develop digital collections-focussed content to stay connected with existing audiences, and reach new audiences. Technical support will, as appropriate, pilot solutions (based on integration of existing tools) and demonstrate how a fully-developed infrastructure for cultural heritage data, when coupled with digital skills support, might benefit even the smallest museums, as well as well-resourced and digitally-savvy IROs. This community of practice will explore prototype solutions for user-group testing, that respond directly to emerging challenges, informing the TaNC discovery process. The study is action research with a cohort of staff and/or volunteers from small museums, who will create online content based on their collections. The methodology is built around the collaborative action research approach developed by Culture 24 over a number of previous projects but adapted for delivery online in a time of home-working and social distancing. The hallmarks of the approach are: Learning from others - including a variety of voices and perspectives from within and beyond the cultural sector, to inform, support, guide and reflect on the challenges at hand. Learning by doing - encouraging practical action research and supporting participants to experiment in the context of their everyday work, testing out hunches developed through collaborative discussions. Learning together - creating a community of supportive peers with a shared sense of purpose, turning them into invaluable sources of understanding for the wider cultural heritage sector. As well as the core collaborative action research, the study will include a socio-technical challenge: as the participants encounter difficulties along the way, the project team will respond where possible and prototype simple tools that demonstrate how a fully developed infrastructure might support even - perhaps especially - the smallest and least resourced museums. This project will engage with six to eight smaller museums who have been navigating these challenges, reporting back to the wider museum sector, and helping others during the what for some have been make-or-break months. Through critical evaluation of current practice in microcosm through online workshops, and a technical gap analysis, the project will draw scalable lessons to inform Towards a National Collection's (TaNC) discovery phase, and AHRC's infrastructure planning.

The UK heritage sector wants to offer all visitors memorable, inclusive, engaging and enjoyable experiences. Museums increasingly provide access to their exhibitions, narratives and artefacts for everyone, with their evolving practice including accessible offers (such as audio description and BSL, audio-guides, interactive content and a wide range of community and educational programming) for people who cannot experience the museum in traditional ways. Yet, this reliance on 'access' provision to support non-traditional visitors perpetuates a dichotomy between 'abled' and 'disabled' people that marginalises non-normative ways of experiencing the museum. When museums provide alternative ways of accessing content for specific audiences, they unwittingly exclude from mainstream provision those people who want or need to access museums through senses other than sight. Consequently, even as museums aim to create welcoming experiences for all visitors, their assumption that sight is a necessary part of the optimal museum experience, risks alienating people who prefer to access and process information in ways that are not only - or not entirely - visual. A challenge remains: how can museums create inclusive interventions (interventions accessible to everyone) without having to spend time and money on also creating 'accessible' programming for minority audiences. The Sensational Museum aims to address this systemic issue by rethinking the role and place of the senses in the museum. It declines the orthodox classical assumptions of the fixed array of 5 bodily senses (that have privileged sight, and reductively contained our other senses) in favour of a new sensory logic. It leverages the liberating notion of 'Sensory Gain' and the idea that everyone can benefit from the 'access' traditionally offered only to disabled visitors. Consequently, the research aims (ambitiously and audaciously) not only to articulate what such 'trans-sensory' thinking and practices might be, but to demonstrate and test this approach within the context of real-world museum collection and communication - evidencing its value for practitioners, policymakers and standards agencies. It leverages inter-disciplinary research by bringing together insights and methods from museum studies, critical disability studies, psychology and design and embraces a co-creation, inclusive methodology where disabled and non-disabled stakeholders are involved in every phase of research design and delivery. It brings together the UK's leading professional bodies and standards agencies (Museums Association and Collections Trust) along with a national network of disability organisations (including the Disability Collaborative Network, the Accentuate Programme and VocalEyes) and a collective of 20 collaborating museums and galleries committed to creative and profound transformation of museum practice (led by Accentuate's 'Curating for Change' network, supported by the NLHF) as well as one of the world's leading cultural consultancies (Barker Langham). This multi-partner project is not just a project about making museums accessible to disabled people. It is a project that uses what we know about disability to change how museums work for everyone. This research will use a design logic to structure and drive its work. First, we will prepare a blueprint for a new sensory logic. We will then prototype an inclusive, co-creation toolkit and trans-sensory data model and interface, before piloting and evaluating these prototypes with museum professionals and visitors across the UK and finally refining and promoting the outputs in publications, conferences and at showcase events. By responding to this systemic sector issue, leveraging inter-disciplinary scholarship, activating this radical concept of the 'trans-sensory', and following a creative and practice-led line of enquiry TSM will produce a radically new way of thinking about museum experience for both practitioners and visitors.

This unique consortium draws on the research excellence of interdisciplinary and complementary design innovation labs at three universities - Lancaster University, Newcastle University and the Royal College of Art and connects it with public and private sectors, linking large and small-scale businesses, service providers and citizens. Together, our expertise in developing and applying creative techniques to navigate unexplored challenges includes that of designers, artists, curators, producers, broadcasters, engineers, managers, technologists and writers - and draws on wider expertise from across the partner universities and beyond. The Creative Exchange responds to profound changes in practice in the creative and media-based industries stimulated by the opening of the digital public space, the ability of everyone to access, explore and create in any aspect of the digital space, moving from 'content consumption' to 'content experience'. It explores new forms of engagement and exchange in the broadcast, performing and visual arts, digital media, design and gaming sectors, by focusing on citizen-led content, interactive narrative, radical personalization and new forms of value creation in the context of the 'experience economy'. The primary geographic focus is the Northwest of England centred around the opportunity presented by the growth of MediaCityUK and its surrounding economy. The three universities act as local test beds with field trials in London, Lancaster and Newcastle prior to larger public facing trials in the northwest. This will support the North West regional strategy for growth in digital and creative media industries, whilst generating comparative research and development locally, nationally and internationally. The Creative Exchange has been developed in response to a paradigm shift in content creation and modes of distribution in a digitally connected world, which has profound impact for the arts and humanities. This transformational-change is taking place within the landscape of a growing digital public space that includes archives, data, information and content. How we navigate and experience this space - and how we generate content for and within it - is central to how we create economic, social, cultural and personal value. The Hub draws on new and agile approaches to knowledge exchange for the creative economy that have been previously developed by the partner universities and new ones co-developed with specialist arts organizations, sector organizations and communities of users.