The Sloane Lab

During the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Sir Hans Sloane formed a large and unique collection of plants, animals, books, manuscripts, coins and artefacts. Funded partly from the profits of slavery as well as through his work as a physician, this material became one of the founding collections of the British Museum following his death in 1753. However, no single accessible catalogue of this collection exists online today.

This project will address the challenges of bringing together digital records of material across Sloane's collection in different institutions, which includes digitised versions of the original handwritten catalogues. It will build and test new user-friendly digital tools to create the Sloane Lab, a digital platform that links this material together for the first time.

Through collaborative work with people from different communities and with varying knowledge of Sloane's collection, the project will identify the diverse questions that the Sloane Lab will be built to answer. It will also engage with other organisations to understand their needs and challenges in linking collections. These technologies can be shared with and applied to other digital collections.

This research will contribute to the eventual creation of a shared national digital collection across different institutions in the UK.

The project will:

• Devise automated ways to mend the broken links between Sir Hans Sloane’s founding collection across the British Museum, Natural History Museum and the British Library. 
• Create the Sloane Lab, a programme of digital tools and applications to support research, exploration, the interlinking of digital records and creative engagement with the digital national collection. 
• Facilitate richer, more critical understandings of the origins and development of museum collections to explore the often-hidden processes of colonialism, empire and slavery and how they have shaped collections and their classifications. 
• Evaluate the role of artificial intelligence (AI), digital humanities, data science and historical collection records in the infrastructure of a future national shared digital collection.
• Undertake ongoing, participatory research with diverse audiences, project partners and the wider heritage sector that accommodates a range of perspectives and voices to broaden the general public's interaction with the national collection.
• Examine the landscape of the UK's national collections and how to offer better experiences of access for online users. 
• Work with museums and libraries to make recommendations about future projects and initiatives to bring digital collections together.

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