Digital Heritage Hub Search

The Portland Museum is dedicated to working with its local community to protect and promote the unique heritage of the Isle of Portland in Dorset. Over the past five years, the museum has used advances in digital technology across the arts and heritage sectors to create new ways for people to engage with its collections. This resource explains how the museum trained and supported volunteers to produce 3D digital models of items from its collection.

Oral histories and stories are an important part of recording, preserving and presenting the intangible cultural heritage of places and communities. This guide explores oral history approaches in a digital context and how online resources can improve collaboration and contributions.

This guide by Dr Katharine Walker will help you navigate copyright when sharing your collection online. It explains how to identify which items in your heritage organisation’s collection you can share online.

As a medium-sized heritage organisation with a valuable archive, and possible brand identity too, how do you go about planning for the digitisation of your content? This guide seeks to offer some practical advice, points for consideration, and signpost some really informative resources to get you started.

Digitisation serves a range of purposes and offers many benefits for heritage archives. As a small organisation you may be wondering how you might plan and prepare for digitisation. This is a concise guide on how to get started and what to consider.

Digitising your archive can enable more people to engage with your content and heritage organisation. In this resource, Sarah Saunders looks at the ways digital archives and collections can be organised so that visitors can engage more deeply with them online. She explores the importance of keeping the user front and centre to ensure that your online archive reflects the engagement you want for your users.

Creating a new digital archive requires a bit of forethought and consideration. In this article, we’ll give you some useful tips to help you get started with the process of creating a digital archive.

In this webinar recording Kevin Gosling from the Collections Trust looks at Spectrum guidance on using collections and thinking about how you might turn this into a well-oiled workflow in your organisation. He provides tips for working with multiple versions of images and other digital assets. Kevin also explores how to create your online content as efficiently as possible, not least so that it can be re-used for other projects in the future.

In this webinar recording, Kevin Gosling from the Collections Trust looks at the many different ways you might present your stories online to help you decide which approaches would be best for your project. He provides ideas on the various formats you might consider for presenting collections online, including the pros and cons of different approaches and highlighting some of the accessibility pitfalls to avoid.

Getting your heritage organisation’s collection online can be a daunting challenge. But as Kevin Gosling from the Collections Trust explains in this webinar recording, online collections have many of the same management issues as physical collections. Careful planning and rigorous documentation is needed if you want to get the raw material of your real objects collection digitised and online.

In this webinar recording Kevin Gosling from the Collections Trust will help you think about how your online collection can help tell your heritage organisation’s story. Kevin provides ideas on how to brainstorm stories that might be told about your collections; provides an understanding of how to test potential ideas with target audiences and how to sharpen up your writing for online readers. This resource will help you identify, test and refine stories from your online collection to help you develop digital content that engages with your digital audiences.

There are many challenges and benefits of working with remote-based digital volunteers. In this case study Kate Knowlden from the The Food Museum (formerly Museum of East Anglian Life) shares her experience of working on the museum’s ‘Search for the Stars’ project, which is using remote-working digital volunteers to help transfer the museum’s 40,000 paper-based object records over to its online collections management system. Kate talks about the museum’s process of recruiting, training and supporting digital volunteers.

Established over 25 years ago, the Princess Royal Class Locomotive Trust (PRCLT) care for some of the most prized cultural assets of the glory days of steam rail travel as operators of West Shed Museum in Swanwick, Derbyshire. In this case study Oliver Edwards reflects on how this small heritage organisation has improved digital engagement with its small objects online collection to help the organisation tell its story.