About the project

In recent years, community and archive collections across the UK have adopted digital technologies to gather and record vast, unique and vital historic collections. As part of the Our Heritage, Our Stories project, which aims to explore these collections as part of a national collection, The National Archives’ has explored possibilities for bringing these community-generated collections together into one online search tool.

The new search tool aims to increase access to UK community collections, create new opportunities to for people to find these histories, and encourage the public to explore them in new ways.

Developed in conjunction with the AI Lab at the University of Manchester, the tool also explores how to present enrichments to help users understand collections. These enrichments are presented via AI-generated related tags that uncover connections to people, places, and organisations of the past. Tags include location, person, organisation, and miscellaneous.

The Our Heritage, Our Stories partnership includes researchers in digital humanities, archives, history, linguistics, and computer science at the Universities of Glasgow and Manchester. The National Archives leads on digital archives infrastructure development.

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the project is part of the Towards a National Collection programme, which aims to break down barriers that exist between the UK’s outstanding cultural heritage collections.

You can find out more about Our Heritage, Our Stories and read reports on its findings on the Towards a National Collection website.