Final Report - Our Heritage, Our Stories: Linking and searching Community-Generated Digital Content

Community-generated digital content (CGDC) is a precious cultural resource that can complement, correct and contradict the existing historical record. However, this rich and important content created by and for communities is digitally fragile: it is fragmented and difficult to access and preserve due to technological and organisational barriers. The challenges of integrating CGDC into larger archives have effectively silenced diverse community voices within the UK’s national collection.

Our Heritage, Our Stories (OHOS) responded to those challenges by bringing together cutting-edge approaches from cultural heritage, the humanities, and computer science. By engaging with communities and institutional partners nationwide, OHOS mapped out the specific nature and the various barriers standing in the way of citizen access to CGDC. The project created integrated access to born-digital and digitised CGDC collections through an innovative public-facing Observatory at The National Archives, while producing user-friendly tools for remixing and re-using data, allowing it to be visualised as Knowledge Graphs. OHOS created ground-breaking technical, organisational, legal, and procedural frameworks for data management of complex CGDC. Our significant achievement offers a blueprint for how to tie community archives into a wider context of greater accessibility and usefulness whilst simultaneously assuring said archives’ ownership of and control over their content. Addressing key areas for innovation and growth in the UK’s creative industries, OHOS enables improved use and re-use of complex heritage data at scale by national organisations while identifying the strengths of small and local heritage organisations that disproportionately contribute to wellbeing, inclusion, and developing capabilities across the regions.