Approach

• The project recommends that the creation of the national collection be undertaken through linkage between existing and specially-created ‘connective tissue’ data rather than by systematised aggregation of identically formatted data.

Audiences for digital collections

• Whilst we want to ensure a national collection has broad appeal, we should not fall into the trap of thinking the national collection needs to be everything to everyone. Creation and use of a national collection must take account of participants’ motivations, enabling them to become involved in ways that feel useful to them.

Data and digital assets

• Accessing data is a more complex process than it might initially seem; the heritage sector uses differing standards and often uses dated relational databases from which export requires human resource. The project recommends further investment in APIs for the sector rather than relying on data exports and data and digital asset transfers.

Tools and standards

• The speed at which digital tools and techniques are developing makes it difficult to recommend investing in fixed systems, tools and machine learning techniques. Instead, Congruence Engine recommends development of a suite (or registry) of tools and services that can be maintained and updated, allowing researchers and national collection users to choose those most appropriate for them, depending on their needs and the datasets in question.
• Congruence Engine recommends that no attempt is made to create a new overarching data standard, but instead, a series of standard data mappings that allow collections of different types (archive, museums, libraries, Wikidata, personal collections or community archives) to be linked.

Pipelines

• A national collection should offer multiple flexible pipeline processes to enable people to contribute, analyse and connect collections depending on their specific requirements. It is important to consider the usage of technical language, such as ‘pipelines’, in describing the findings of the towards a national collection project.

Digitisation and digitalisation

• Congruence Engine recommends rethinking digitisation processes that only result in a digital image or a flat digital file. The Congruence Engine pipeline is interested in digitisation processes that make analogue material machine readable.
• Congruence Engine recommends TaNC adopt a broad definition of ‘the national collection’ to incorporate datasets including, for example, the census, or data from within archives rendered machine readable, that through their affordances as ‘connective tissue’ may enable the linkage of conventional GLAM collection items such as objects or pictures.

People and skills

• Congruence Engine recommends clear specifications for both social and technical infrastructural resource. Technology alone cannot create a sustainable and generative national collection.
• Alongside any resource for technical infrastructure, resource for training and long-term skills development is needed. Currently there exists no career path for digital heritage specialists, and existing historical and curatorial practitioners are not equipped to undertake the more digital forms of practice that we can expect to become normal in the near future.
• There are important questions to be addressed relating to the siloeing of different kinds of expertise – digital, historical and curatorial – often reinforced by distinct language and working cultures. We recommend investment in career paths for individuals to gain hybrid skills to enable the linked national collection within the coming age of more digital curatorship and scholarship.

Diversity and Governance

• A national collection as social machine will need a distributed and federated governance structure, one that enables local decision-making and contribution and does not require central control. A major focus of our next phase of work will be to understand what this might mean and how it might be designed.
• Industrial heritage is a record of British colonial expansion and capitalist extraction. To see the national collection as a social machine offers a means of understanding how better to approach this subject, by activating different collections, knowledge and positions.