Our Heritage, Our Stories: Linking and searching community-generated digital content to develop the people's national collection

国家收藏分布在社区、地方和国家组织。在过去的二十年里，社区采用数字技术以“公民历史”的形式收集和记录他们的藏品，这创造了一个真正民主的、关于过去的新知识的巨大宝库。这个水库可以无限地丰富我们的国家和全球认识，但大部分尚未开发，难以找到，并有完全消失的危险。社区生成的数字内容（CGDC）的智力和经济投资是巨大的，其丰富多样的内容是英国主要的文化资产之一，但由于技术和组织障碍，它处于“极度濒危”状态。事实证明，CGDC对传统的链接和整合方式非常抵触，这意味着通常由公众资助和生产的资源是独立的或无法获得的。以社区为中心的各种声音，维持着转型期社区脆弱的历史，在我们共同的国家收藏中实际上被压制了。针对该问题的现有解决方案涉及定制干预活动，既昂贵、耗时又不可持续，而对这些数据进行任何简单的计算整合都会导致最低公分母的解决方案，这将抹煞CGDC及其创建者的意义和目的。我们的遗产，我们的故事项目通过汇集强大的合作伙伴关系来应对这一紧迫的挑战，包括我们的HEI合作伙伴格拉斯哥大学和曼彻斯特大学的数字人文、档案、历史、语言学和计算机科学方面的研究人员，以及该项目牵头的英国国家档案馆（TNA）世界领先的档案和数字基础设施开发。该团队将带来来自文化遗产、人文科学和计算机科学的前沿方法，以消除现有障碍，并在CGDC和TNA藏品之间建立可扩展的链接和可发现性。在这个过程中，我们将与英国主要的遗产组织合作，包括泰特美术馆、大英博物馆、苏格兰和威尔士国家图书馆、国家彩票遗产基金、北爱尔兰公共记录办公室，以及一个由较小的区域和地方遗产组织组成的网络，这些组织持有由社区创建的和与社区有关的数字内容。我们的地理范围对于真正的全国性方法至关重要，这种方法与英国的每一个部分都有联系。我们的项目将采用多学科的方法，在国家馆藏中发现以前无法找到和无法链接的CGDC，同时通过共同设计和构建复杂的自动化工具，尊重和拥抱其复杂性和多样性，使其可搜索和连接。我们将通过在TNA新建一个面向公众的大型天文台，向世界展示其新的可访问性，人们可以访问、重用和重新混合这些新集成的内容。随着我们消除这些藏品之间的障碍并增加有意义的联系，我们将使它们能够接触到新的、不同的受众，并通过多学科案例研究来展示它们，并将未来管理CGDC的新策略融入到遗产实践和培训中。公众参与是我们项目的驱动主题，该项目将基于合作制作和参与式设计的原则进行开发。这个项目的持久遗产将是以前孤立的、隐藏的和分散的CGDC的财富，它将定位并使其被发现。通过这样做，我们将通过开发尖端工具、人工智能方法、历史和语言学研究以及可持续档案实践的新框架，彻底改变我们对过去的理解，以及实现这一目标的方法和手段。通过使CGDC得到再利用和重新构想，我们将帮助它在未来和我们共同的国家收藏中生存和发展。

The national collection is distributed throughout communities, localities, and national organisations. In the past two decades communities have adopted digital technologies to gather and record their collections in a form of 'citizen history' that has created a truly democratic and vast reservoir of new knowledge about the past. This reservoir could immeasurably enrich our national and global understanding but remains largely untapped, hard to find, and at risk of disappearing altogether. The intellectual and economic investment in community-generated digital content (CGDC) is immense and its rich and diverse content is one of the UK's prime cultural assets, but it is 'critically endangered' due to technological and organisational barriers. CGDC has proved extraordinarily resistant to traditional methods of linking and integration, meaning that resources often funded and produced by the public stand alone or are inaccessible. Diverse community-focused voices, sustaining the fragile histories of communities in transition, have effectively been silenced within our shared national collection. Existing solutions to this problem involving bespoke interventionist activities are expensive, time-consuming and unsustainable at scale, whilst any unsophisticated computational integration of this data would result in a lowest-common-denominator solution which would erase the meaning and purpose of both CGDC and its creators.The Our Heritage, Our Stories project responds to this urgent challenge by bringing together a powerful partnership, including researchers in digital humanities, archives, history, linguistics, and computer science at our HEI partners, the Universities of Glasgow and Manchester, with world-leading archive and digital infrastructure development at The National Archives (TNA), the project's lead IRO. This team will bring cutting-edge approaches from cultural heritage, humanities and computer science to dissolve existing barriers and develop scalable linking and discoverability across CGDC and the collections of TNA. We will collaborate in this process with leading UK heritage organisations, including Tate, the British Museum, the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, and a network of smaller regional and local heritage organisations holding digital content created by and relating to communities. Our geographic range is essential for a truly national approach which engages with every part of the UK.Our project will use multidisciplinary methods to make previously unfindable and unlinkable CGDC discoverable within the national collection, while respecting and embracing its complexity and diversity by co-designing and building sophisticated automated tools to make it searchable and connected. We will showcase its new accessibility to the world through a major new public-facing Observatory at TNA where people can access, reuse, and remix this newly integrated content. As we dissolve barriers and add meaningful links across these collections, we will make them accessible to new and diverse audiences and open them up for research - demonstrated via multidisciplinary case studies - and embed new strategies for future management of CGDC into heritage practice and training. Public engagement is a driving theme in our project, which will be developed on principles of co-production and participatory design.The lasting legacies of this project will be the wealth of previously siloed, hidden, and fragmented CGDC it will situate and render discoverable. By so doing, we will revolutionise our understanding of the past, and the methods and means to achieve this, by developing cutting-edge tools, AI methods, historical and linguistic research, and new frameworks for sustainable archival practice. By enabling CGDC to be re-used and reimagined, we will help it survive and be nourished, for the future and for our shared national collection.