The British School at Rome has a world class research Library and Archives include Special Collections of early guides to Rome, engravings, maps and manuscripts as well as unique collections of photographs and personal archives and documents relating to the history and activities of the BSR. Digitisation projects accompanied by rich metadata began in 2002 with the cataloguing of 15,000 images and the creation of the BSR Digital Collections website in 2009. The aim was simply to make available online our unique material. From the outset priority was given to the use of international standards and interoperability of our data and to guaranteeing the long-term conservation of both digital images and metadata (METS).
Today the Library and Archive also generate original international research projects on the collections, the results of which will be peer reviewed and published online together with the digitized version of the material studied. Three separate collaborative projects are ongoing: William Gell’s notebooks, the John Marshall Archive and the Digital Cartography of the Roman Campagna. We need now to present these initiatives in a single portal, facilitating access, engaging with a wider public, generating interactive and collaborative research, integrating local and external resources. Our methodology so far has been to research other realities and examples, both international and local, to study the results achieved by similar small institutions, to consult both local and international professionals, to carry out a user survey, to organize two workshops, one on Digital Cartography and the most recent, in collaboration with the European Space Agency, on Digital Cultural Heritage, to select and implement open source software for the description and management of archival resources and to collaborate with King’s College London, Department of Digital Humanities to further define our goals.
Our ambition is to enhance our output, moving from consultation, conservation and specialist research to offering more dynamic interactions with digital data, including crowdsourcing and citizen science.