The British Library's Shared Repository Service was developed to support cultural heritage organisations in sharing their data and opening up their research. Piloted through 2018-2021, and supported with initial AHRC iDAH funding in 2021, it has continued to bring iDAH further towards inclusion of heritage and IRO research. Developments in the previous 12 months have improved functionality for users, branding options for partners, and metadata. During that period, conversations with other IROs about future use of the shared repository and bringing their research into the platform have brought them closer towards on boarding, and our interviews to understand how to meet needs beyond the IRO Consortium have identified the next steps to further strengthen open data and scholarship across UK heritage research. Now IROs understand the future of iDAH, more organisations are keen to move towards set up. Further effort is now required over the next 12 months to continue improving the repository service, ramp up the inclusion of partner organisations and deliver vital skills development to IRO colleagues in support of increased use of repository services, and key competencies for open scholarship. The Shared Repository Service will allow for adherence to Open Access and data sharing mandates, while providing institution-specific front-end repositories to heritage organisations with nationally- and internationally-recognised brands, allowing partners to showcase the research produced by their expert staff. This research is produced through business-as-usual activity, as well as from collaborative research projects, and other activity such as artist in residence programmes. The British Library's Shared Repository Service aggregates that research content across partners to make participation a collective activity that increases the visibility of heritage research from across the UK. This creates a scaling of benefits while allowing a maintenance of organisational branding and impact.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

In 1757 King George II presented the approximately 1950 manuscripts of the royal library to the newly founded British Museum. Since that time, the manuscripts have remained together as a distinct collection: ROYAL. Royal preserves the medieval and Renaissance library of the kings and queens of England, and includes within the illuminated manuscripts most surviving medieval paintings owned by them. Hence its importance can hardly be overstated. \n\nYet remarkably, the Royal illuminated manuscripts have been little researched, and have never been presented to a scholarly or wider public as a group. The British Library, home of the Royal collection since its creation in 1973, plans to change this situation by working collaboratively with the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, to present in October 2011-March 2012 a major exhibition of illuminated Royal manuscripts at the British Library in London. To make this possible a research project on these manuscripts will be undertaken, responding to research questions at complementary levels. \n\nThe project team will be led by two internationally-recognised experts in illuminated manuscripts: Dr Scot McKendrick, Head of Western Manuscripts at the British Library, and Professor John Lowden of the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. They will be assisted by a postdoctoral scholar, providing opportunities for this scholar to develop her or his expertise and career, and to develop expertise in medieval and Renaissance art, history, and presenting manuscripts to a range of audiences. The scholarly research resulting from the experience and expertise of this team will allow the Royal manuscripts to be presented and contextualised in new and creative ways. \n\nTo build further collaborative relationships between the British Library and higher education experts and fellow curators within the United Kingdom and internationally, the project will be overseen by an international advisory board, and will include an international conference on the collection to be held at the end of the project.\n\nEach of the approximately 400 illuminated manuscripts in Royal with significant medieval or Renaissance decoration will be examined individually, to research its patronage, artist, scribe, models and function. The results of this analysis will allow thematic questions to be formulated and answered, and the approximately 150 exhibition manuscripts to be chosen. The exhibition will then be structured around these thematic questions. These themes are likely to include studies in the formation and development of the collection of illustrated manuscripts by English monarchs, the role of pictorial narrative in illuminated vernacular histories ordered by Edward IV, the change in function of monastic illuminated manuscripts after the dissolution of the monasteries, and the way in which illuminated manuscripts in the library were used and received by their owners. \n\nThe project will interpret and present medieval and Renaissance painting in Royal manuscripts in an innovative way in an exhibition in London, which will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated exhibition catalogue. The research will also be disseminated freely to an international audience through an online virtual exhibition and online introductory 'tours' for a general audience explaining aspects of the Royal collection of illuminated manuscripts. \n\nIn addition, in order to respond to the needs of the wider scholarly community and provide long-term research benefits, the information on all 400 manuscripts will be made available online as part of the BL's free, illustrated Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts (CIM). The research made available through the CIM and the other online resources will allow scholars and the general public to formulate their own further research questions, promoting active learning.

The British Library's Shared Research Repository service is currently in beta and has been fully sponsored by the British Library as a pilot project for two years. We are now ready to move into a full service, but have identified activities where additional support of AHRC will be key to the success of this transition. We have put these into three work packages ('WP1-3'). These are: WP1: Support for repository on-boarding. Many heritage organisations do not currently have the capacity to on-board their backlog of content to any repository. WP2: Research into a general use repository option. We need to better understand the scope of a wide-use repository offer that allows one-off outputs to be made available from any organisation in the sector. WP3: Development of platform improvements. Improving the design, customisation and metadata functionality of repository platform will increase the benefits to all users.

The 2,500 museums, heritage collections and heritage sites in the UK house at least 200 million physical and digital objects. Being able to uniquely identify these objects is key to facilitating their use and curation - you cannot provide a researcher with access to an item or include it in an exhibition if you don't know what it is. Unique accession numbers are therefore a key component in all collection and library management systems but these only include the objects within an individual collection. To fully realise the potential benefits of our national collections in terms of the social and cultural life of the UK, the economic impact of the heritage sector, and the contribution to the UK's international prestige and influence, we need identifiers that will bring together all of the objects from all of the collections. Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) that provide a long-lasting actionable reference to a digital object are recognised by UKRI as a key component of future research infrastructure enabling data discovery, access and citation. Facilitating wider adoption and consistency of approach to the assigning of PIDs to collection objects, environments, specimens and other relevant entities, is a key step to the persistent, unambiguous linking of collections in order to create a digital UK National Collection. However, the challenges, utility and wider benefits of PID implementation are less well understood across the heritage sector. While many individual institutions are using PIDs to a greater or lesser extent, to date there has been very little cross-sector or cross-collection collaboration and / or support to facilitate a cohesive approach that will maximise the benefits to all organisations. This foundation project will bring together best practices in the use of PIDs from a collection perspective, building on existing IRO work and expertise developed through existing research projects. By sharing expertise and best practice, we will provide a framework and recommendations on the approach to PIDs for colleagues in local, regional and national institutions across the UK heritage sector. Through a mixture of workshops, desk research and case studies, the project will seek to answer questions such as 'What are the gaps in the existing PID landscape for heritage collections, buildings and environments?' and 'What should a PID infrastructure, strategy and governance framework look like for a unified UK national collection?'. The project will deliver a set of recommendations to guide the selection, implementation and use of PIDs to heritage collections and related entities and concepts, as well as a number of case studies and supporting resources that can be used across the sector as a guide to real-world PID implementation. In driving the use of PIDs for heritage collections, the project will enable greater use of these collections in all contexts, but especially in research. It will allow improved linking across platforms such as Wikidata, making it easier to associate related concepts and metadata with canonical sources of artefact information and the artefacts themselves. It will provide for the curation and selection of this information from diverse sources to be displayed alongside artefacts in physical spaces and online viewers. Importantly, they will also make this increase in use more evident and measurable, through the improved metrics that PIDs support.