Our Heritage, Our Stories

Linking and searching community-generated digital content to develop the people's national collection

Our Heritage, Our Stories is a £3.6m research project that will use artificial intelligence to explore digital community heritage collections across the UK supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Towards a National Collection programme to create a unified virtual ‘national collection’. The project is led by the University of Glasgow and involves three co-investigators at the University of Manchester: Professor Hannah Barker (History), and Professor Goran Nenadic and Dr Riza Batista-Navarro (Computer Science), working alongside The National Archives in London.

Our Heritage, Our Stories will work for three years with heritage organisations across Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland to explore the vast community-generated reservoir of knowledge about the past which is at risk. This ranges from personal and private collections to websites that explore the histories and culture of geographic areas and neighbourhoods. All of this rich and democratic content is often hard for researchers and the public to discover and use due to its dispersed nature.

The project will build sophisticated AI-based tools to bring together this community-generated digital content and make it searchable by anyone, anywhere in the world. This content will be showcased through a major public-facing Observatory at The National Archives, where people can access, reuse, and remix these collections.

Project partners

Our Heritage, Our Stories project partners include The National Archives, The University of Manchester, Tate, British Museum, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Archives+, Wikimedia UK, the Association for Learning Technology, the Digital Preservation Coalition, the Software Sustainability Institute, the Dictionaries of the Scots Language and the National Lottery Heritage Fund.