Keywords: Research Resources, Digital Methodologies, Data Analysis.
Each year, the National Archives (TNA) receives data from across the United Kingdom on accessions to repositories from across the archive sector. Although collected as part of routine cataloguing procedures, this data holds the potential to both reveal patterns of collection within the national sector during the first decades of the twenty-first century, and to generate new knowledge on what has been collected and where.
Since October 2021, research has been undertaken to repurpose this accessions to repositories data, to prepare it for analysis, and to develop methods to make it more accessible. This paper will outline the digital methodologies adopted by the project to refine, visualise and analyse accessions data. It will discuss the findings from the research, and the strategies explored to improve access to the data. It will present visualisations to outline the potentials for accessions data to create new knowledge, the relevance of its findings to the digital humanities, and the possibilities for new understandings of national heritage collections the research offers.