In this post, the second of our DPASSH blog series, we invited Sian McInerney, Collections & Research Manager from The Hunt Museum to talk to us about the DPASSH 2024 Conference and the experience of co-hosting.
In January 2024, the DRI asked the Hunt Museum and the University of Limerick to cohost their biennial Digital Preservation for the Arts Social Sciences & Humanities conference to be held in Limerick in July 2024. The chosen conference theme Collections as Data, Data as Collections was relevant and of interest to the work at the Hunt Museum, therefore we gladly accepted the opportunity to cohost. The DRI has been integral to the Hunt in developing & publishing its digital collections.
The museum has built into its 2025 Strategy that it would operate across three main platforms: human, physical and digital (2020-2025). One of the ways that the museum has achieved its aim of operating in the virtual space has been through the connection of its digital collection to a worldwide audience of researchers and visitors through the publication of its digital collections.
Hunt Museum strategy, 2025“Actively collect, research, conserve, preserve and secure the core Hunt collection of antiquities and fine art, while, at the same time, widening our remit to care for other collections of public interest. Digitise and deliver online to open our collections to a broader public.”
The DRI has been indispensable to the museum in achieving this goal, through its role as Ireland’s national aggregator for Europeana. With the DRI team’s help, the Hunt has gained experience evaluating our collections, preparing our metadata, and ingesting our digital collections into the DRI repository. The DRI and the Hunt worked together on publishing objects from the Medieval collection on Europeana as part of the Art of Reading in the Middle Ages project but also the Sybil Connolly Collection and more recently the beginning of a project to publish 3D Models from the Hunt Museum Collection objects on the DRI.
A selection of items from the Sybil Connolly Collection archive was also exhibited in the Special Collections area of the University of Limerick Library. We were very grateful to the library team at UL, who allowed us to display these sketches, fabrics, and scrapbooks, displayed aptly as data by Joan Murphy of the DRI a literal demonstration of theme Collections as Data.
The Hunt was asked to host the keynote event on the evening of the first day, a huge honour to host keynote speaker Dr Coen Wilders, Head of Collection Information and Archive within the Research Services department at the Rijksmuseum, an institution which has led the way in implementing FAIR practices in the GLAM sector.
Hosting the keynote would also allow an opportunity to showcase the world-class Hunt collection to colleagues in national and international institutions and showcase our digital visitor engagement innovations and digital interactives. The museum had recently developed an interactive using an annotated 3D model of the Antrim Cross (a unique 9th-century cross with millefiori enamel), which was developed as part of the Ireland and the Birth of Europe exhibition. Also on display was a soundscape created by Dr Eoin Callery of UL that played the peel of 9th-century bronze monastic and handbells from the Hunt collection.
Dr Coen Wilders gave an engaging presentation describing FAIR principles in practice at the Rijksmuseum and continued the ethos of sharing by describing in detail the process of implementing FAIR principles to enable access to Cultural Heritage Data for all. A great takeaway was that the approaches implemented by Rijksmuseum such as sharing CC0 and free download of high-resolution images, and the sharing of the digital collections online have been replicated by the Hunt Museum, albeit on a much smaller scale.
We are hugely grateful to the DRI for choosing Limerick, The Hunt Museum and the University of Limerick as the venues for the 2024 DPASSH conference, fostering continuing links across the three institutions.
