The Sloane Lab is one of five ‘Discovery Projects’ sharing £14.5m of Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funding to democratise and decolonise the UK’s culture and heritage collections. Click here for more info.

The lab will bring together the British Museum, Natural History Museum and the British Library, and the team will be working closely with Historic Environment Scotland, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, National Museums of Scotland, Community Archives and Heritage Group, Down County Museum, National Galleries of Scotland, Oxford University Herbaria and the Collecting the West project, which is funded by the Australian Research Council & metaphacts.

Principal Investigator and Professor of Digital Humanities Julianne Nyhan (UCL Information Studies and UCL Centre for Digital Humanities), said: “This project is about mending the broken links between the past and present of the UK’s founding collection in the catalogues of the British Museum, Natural History Museum and the British Library. We may even reconnect information about artefacts that was thought to have been lost forever.”

#SirHansSloane's collection was the foundation of the @BritishMuseum, and later @britishlibrary & @NHM_London. @juliannenyhan is leading one of our projects to reconnect the collection as a case study for key Qs around cultural heritage, imperialism and institutional memory. pic.twitter.com/Mcp9oSF7V2

— Towards a National Collection (@nat_collection) September 21, 2021

You can read more about this groundbreaking project at the following linked pages:

“Sloane lab will open collections for all”

“The Natural History Museum to collaborate on brand new digital project to virtually reunite Sir Hans Sloane’s collections”

Hear PI Julianne Nyhan explain the project here: