The BIAA is delighted to announce our latest digital repository project, ‘Connecting Archives, Connecting People’ – a partnership with the British Institute for Libyan & Northern African Studies (BILNAS), supported by the Imagining Futures through Un/Archived Pasts’ initiative, funded by AHRC/UKRI.
‘Connecting Archives, Connecting People’ aims to widen access to archives by focusing on the concept of ‘creators’ – the people who collect, create, and interpret archival material – as ways to connect documents and information hosted in different institutions.
In the first phase of the project, the BIAA will work with BILNAS to generate and curate key personal name datasets and add authority links to VIAF, LCAH and Wikidata to clarify the identity of specific individuals and standardise the terminology used throughout the databases. A Linked Open Data (LOD) template will be created, along with workflow and guidance documents in English, Arabic and Turkish. This will then be shared with the British International Research Institutes (BIRI) housing collections relating to Iraq, Italy, Greece, East Africa, the Levant, Iran and the wider Persionate world. Finally, two online workshops will be organised to disseminate results and share best practices with other galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs).
Connecting information between the different Institutes’ archives will be an important contribution to making knowledge around the artefacts, excavations, cultural events and other materials richer and more complementary, as it will add multiple perspectives on entities that appear in more than one collection.
For more information, please contact BIAA Digital Repository Manager Nurdan Atalan Çayırezmez on: repository.manager@biaa.ac.uk, who is working alongside Prof Charlotte Roueche to lead this project.