We are delighted to announce that we have secured three years of funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).
This generous support will enable MDS to continue developing its groundbreaking digital infrastructure, connecting and sharing object records from museums across the UK – already over six million from over 150 accredited museums. Read more: https://le.ac.uk/news/2025/august/digitally-catalogued-collections-uk-museums-funding
Professor Ross Parry, Director of the Institute for Digital Culture at the University of Leicester, said: “The University of Leicester is proud to be one of the founding partners of the Museum Data Service, and we are enormously grateful to the AHRC for its continuing support. We now look forward to working with all aspects of the AHRC’s research digital infrastructure development programme, in particular its new two-year investment into the N-RICH Prototype, and the on-going work of the network of five interconnected iDAH-funded data services of which MDS is part.”
Dr Catherine Eagleton, Chair, Museum Data Service, said: “We are so grateful to AHRC for this funding, supporting our bold and ambitious goal for the Museum Data Service to bring together catalogue data from all of the UK’s museums, large and small. Since its launch in September 2024, MDS has already doubled the number of records available to 6 million and this support means we can continue to develop and grow, working closely with the other parts of the AHRC’s digital research infrastructure to revolutionise access to and research with collections.”
Dr Allan Sudlow, Director of Partnerships and Engagement at the AHRC, said “AHRC is pleased to continue to support MDS which is enabling online discoverability of museum collections of all sizes, across all parts of the UK, for access and research. I look forward to the close coordination with other AHRC-UKRI digital infrastructure investments, particularly the National Research Infrastructure for Cultural Heritage (N-RICH). Through these collaborations we want to maximise the impact of UK cultural and heritage collections for research, society and the economy.”
We’re grateful to AHRC for its continued support and look forward to contributing to the UK’s research digital infrastructure, including through collaboration with N-RICH and other iDAH-funded initiatives.
To be a part of the growing number of collections represented on MDS, take a look at the Sharing Data section of our website. If you’re a researcher looking to use the MDS then take a look at the Using Data section and then have a little explore of the Objects and Collections section of the service!