The Endangered Archives Programme (also known as EAP) gives funding to people running projects to digitise and preserve archival materials at risk of destruction. These can date from any time before the middle of the twentieth century, and from most parts of the world except Europe and North America. The resulting digital images and sound files are made available via the British Library’s website. The Programme has been set up to ensure that the owners...

GLAMs’ [Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums] public interest mission is squarely aligned with the open access ethos. Indeed, making their collections as openly accessible, shareable, and reusable as possible is the best way for GLAMs to achieve their mission as they digitize and offer their collections online. But only a tiny fraction of the world’s GLAMs share their collections through open access initiatives. GLAMs face a host of barriers to embracing open access. At Creative...

At the centre of the £18.9m research development programme Towards a National Collection is the aim to increase engagement with the cultural heritage collections of the UK. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the programme is working to link collections and encourage cross-searching of multiple collection types, to enable research and enhance public engagement. This presentation will outline the achievements and ambitions of the funded projects, and start to look ahead to a...

Recording of the Question and Answer discussion from Session 1: Increasing engagement with cultural heritage collections. Open and Engaged conference 2021, hosted at the British Library.

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. In this talk, I look at bringing algorithmic fairness to impact measurement, from web-scale attention tracking to computer-assisted data story-telling. Drawing on my experience with altmetrics, I argue that many proxies for impact correlate not only with impact but also with privilege, and that all stakeholders should therefore disclose the inner workings and the limitations of their information systems to...

For more than a decade, a dedicated bunch of Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums [GLAM] around the world have been advocating for opening up cultural heritage collections while pushing for openness in their own institutions. Today, more than 1,200 GLAMs worldwide feature open access to their digitised assets – making OpenGLAM a trend, but not yet the mainstream. Parallel to this, users are getting used to demanding free and open access to common cultural heritage....

This presentation will reflect on impact as defined in the Research Excellence Framework (REF2021) and that forms a key element of the current dual funding structure of research for Higher Education Institutions. Although impact in its broadest sense extends beyond research, it is most prominently highlighted in the REF as the element that assesses how universities reach out, build relationships, and make a societal difference. It will consider the challenges of impact, the kinds of...

Recording of the Question and Answer discussion from Session 2: Measuring and evaluating impact beyond journal articles. Open and Engaged 2021 conference hosted by the British Library.

The hidden REF was an experiment to counteract existing evaluation methods. UK REF Impact Case Studies have a narrative linearity which fails to appreciate the amazing plethora of interactions, individuals and different types of output that are part of our research culture. The hidden REF exercise aims to celebrate the breadth of activity in the current research culture. There were over 130 submissions into 21 different categories, organised into 5 assessment panels. The Hidden Role...

An inter-disciplinary project undertaken by museum and psychiatry staff at the University of Oxford in 2020 set out to find out if online cultural content could be effective against common mental health issues such as anxiety and depression. The O-ACE (Online Active Community Engagement) project used traditional arts engagement research methods such as surveys and co-production alongside health status measures and psychometric tests as part of a randomised control trial of more than 400 participants....