UK museums offering free access to over 3 million archived records
The widely scattered digital records of archives held by museums across the UK are to be unified into a single online platform that will also be open to the public for free.
Announced yesterday evening, the Museum Data Service (MDS) aims to create a single, easy-to-search website that will be open to all accredited and museum-like venues and provide nationwide insight into their archives and collections.
The MDS is online now and has launched with 3.1 million records from 21 museums, with plans to add another 1.9 million records soon and even more later.
The long-term aim is for the database to eventually bring together over 100 million object records from 1,750 accredited museums and other collections across the UK, unlocking an invaluable resource for researchers, educators, curators, and content developers.
At the moment, a researcher might, for example, need to go to several museum websites to search their collections to see if they have an object or document in their collection, but with the new MDS website, they will be able to run the same search across many museums with a single click.
Likewise, people researching a general topic would struggle to know what museums even hold content relevant to them, but can now run broad searches across many venues at once and get a much broader insight into what museums hold in their arches and how they are describing them.
Museums are now being invited to upload their collections to the public portal, which can be made available to researchers and the public through a range of licenses and permissions.
By consolidating collections into a single platform, collections in smaller museums will also become much more visible. Candidly, many researchers are going to limit themselves to the top half-dozen or so sources they know about (yes, I am guilty) — and that little rural museum you’ve never heard of might well have something you would never have known about and is perfect for you.
While that sounds great for researchers, it benefits the public, as curators working on exhibitions might find something amazing they didn’t know about, include it in the exhibition, and we, the public, then get to see something we might not have. Thanks to the MDS database.
As the Minister for Creative Industries, Arts and Tourism, Sir Chris Bryant, said at the launch, the MDS allows those unconsidered trifles that all museums possess to become visible for the first time.
The MDS could also lower the barriers to accessing information for everyone. That’s because there would be just one website to learn to use, and you wouldn’t have to work out how many different museum databases are catalogued and referenced.
However, as someone who often searches museum collections, one niggle I find with the service is the lack of images on the MDS website. Although searches can be filtered by whether an online image exists, you need to click through each record one by one and open the image hosted on the origin museum’s own website.
If, for example, I am on the British Museum website, I can clearly and quickly see if three of their prints are just reprints of each other, so I can pick the one I want to zoom in on. While the MDS allows me to search many musuems, which is good, it also means that where searching one museum might return three copies of the same image, now it could return 30 copies of the same image. Adding thumbnails would make skimming down the search results much faster and less frusutrating.
That gripe aside, as the collection grows, it will provide a unique and valuable resource for anyone to use.
The Museum Data Service is live now at this website.
Marvellous news! Thanks for sharing.