ResearchSpace – working together for better data

For those of you specialising in research and databases, this could be very useful!

Staff at the British Museum have been attending seminars on an on-going project called “ResearchSpace” – a system encouraging different institutions across the globe to contribute cultural heritage data and work together in researching this integrated information within the cultural heritage community.

The ResearchSpace team will also be contributing to workshops in India and other events for Chinese cultural heritage institutions, as well as working with institutions and people in other countries to encourage international cooperation and to share skills and knowledge.

One example of how Research Space could help curators and scholars is the Naukratis project at the British Museum. This project aims to collect and combine data on Naukratis objects and images into a centralised resource on the BM website for access by the general public and scholars worldwide.

It aims to do this with other museums (some with hundreds of Naukratis items, some with only a few), with each institution providing contextualised data (that retains local meaning) into the ResearchSpace platform and creating a wider, international database.

More detailed information is available here: www.researchspace.org

Research Space can increase the amount of meaningful and scientific information available to scholars and the public through international collaboration. It is also a great way to define objects in relation to the real world. By collecting data from all kinds of sources and of all kinds: from physical attributes to social importance, researchers can gain a much wider and better picture of the artefacts we study.

Sincerest thanks to Dominic Oldman, head of the British Museum ResearchSpace project for his help with this blog.