Towards a National Collection: Opening UK Heritage to the World

The Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture is proud to be representing Middlesex University as one of the partners in a major national research project.

Towards a National Collection is a major five-year £18.9 million project aimed at making collections in the UK’s world-renowned museums, archives, libraries and galleries more accessible and more ‘joined-up’. Funding is provided through UK Research and Innovation’s Strategic Priorities Fund and delivered by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The programme will take the first steps towards creating a unified virtual ‘national collection’ by dissolving barriers between them.

There have so far been Foundation projects, COVID-19 Projects, and Discovery Projects.

Eight small-scale Foundation Projects began on 1 February 2020 and finished in 2022. The foundation projects helped to lay the foundations for a virtual national collection by generating evidence and policy recommendations to inform the future development of the UK  infrastructure of digital collections.

Deep Discoveries

MoDA was part of the ‘Deep Discoveries’ Foundational Project, which set out to address the fact that the way we access information in the virtual space is changing. Discovery and exploration are no longer constrained by a keyword entered into a blank search bar. Instead, museums, libraries, archives and galleries are welcoming a shift to ‘generous interfaces’ – presenting their collections online in browsable and linkable networks of information that allow users to explore and discover new ideas through meaningful and contextualised relationships.

A key component in this emerging virtual browsing landscape is ‘visual search’, an AI-based method for matching similar images based on their visual characteristics (colour, pattern, shape), rather than a keyword description. The Deep Discoveries project aims to create a computer vision search platform that can identify and match images across digitised collections on a national scale.

A botanical theme

S10675 Rose and rosebud chintz design

The research focused on botanical/floral themed content, and MoDA contributed around a thousand designs for wallpapers and textiles from the Silver Studio Collection. The idea was to test how far it is possible to stretch the recognition capabilities of the computer vision and deep learning technology (can it recognise a rose in a textile pattern and the same flower in a herbarium specimen? How about on a ceramic vase?).

Deep Discoveries was a collaboration between The National Archives, the University of Surrey, Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh and the V&A, along with project partners Gainsborough Weaving Company, the Sanderson Design Archive, and the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture.

The team developed and user-tested a Computer-Vision-based search platform that allowed users to search the data using an image, understand how the CV algorithm found similarity between their input image and the returned image results, and to carry out a ‘visual dialogue’ with the AI to refine their search further. The aim was to design a platform that would allow users to both narrow-in on specific images during a directed search as well as to broaden-out and discover new collection items during an exploratory search.

The research concluded that there was a great deal of interest in visual searching as a tool, but that there are many different audiences with different requirements, and that this may therefore require a range of different search tools. Designing any future systems therefore requires considering these audiences and their goals, motivations and tasks. There was also a recognition of the need to be transparent about collecting, digitising and sharing practices of institutions and also about how computer vision search models are trained.

You can read the full report and recommendations here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5710412

[Angelova, Lora, Ogden, Bernard, Craig, Jack, Chandrapal, Hari, Manandhar, Dipu, 2021. Deep Discoveries: A Towards a National Collection Foundation Project Final Report.]