David Saywell from Art UK explains: In late February this year, just before our charity’s 10th anniversary, we reached a milestone of 1 million artworks on Art UK, drawn from 3,500 different public art collections and nationwide public sculpture and murals campaigns. Just 15 months earlier there had only been 300,000 artworks on the site. Just a few months later in early June we surpassed another marker, seeing half a million of these records being illustrated, with record and image ingestion now at least 20 times faster than at any other time during Art UK’s history.
How have we managed to so dramatically improve efficiency in our operations? The answer lies in the Museum Data Service, a sector transforming joint initiative set up by Art UK, Collections Trust and the University of Leicester, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Bloomberg Philanthropies.
The service and workflows associated with it make it so much easier for organisations to share their collections with Art UK at no cost to them, with far less effort by Art UK to bring records on to the platform.
The secret to this success lies in its simplicity. Once a collection signs an agreement, the MDS team takes an export of collections data (which can often be all the collection, not just artworks) from the collection’s own collections management system, according to whatever the collection wishes to share, and maps it within the Museum Data Service. For a collection that is literally it – they decide what they wish to export, and which fields they wish to share – and there is a simple licence to sign allowing the data to appear on the Museum Data Service website.
Collections have told me how unbelievably straightforward joining the MDS has been, and so quick – just a few online calls and no more than a hour of their time spent helping get their data on to the site.
We can then to use a number of system filters to pull the artworks from this larger set of data through to Art UK. If newly filtered Museum Data Service records match the accession numbers of records already on Art UK, then these works flow through to an update stream. If the accession numbers are not recognised these records flow through to a new record workflow, and once artists new to Art UK are added, these new records can flow through.
Where it might have taken the data team of two all year to bring in 10,000 records in the past, grappling with spreadsheets, 10,000 records can be imported on to Art UK from start to finish well within a day.
The nett result is that collections who had not engaged with Art UK since early digitisation campaigns have re-energised their participation with Art UK. Some have brought their entire works on paper collections through to the site.
The Victoria Art Gallery in Bath don’t have their own online collection facility. They reported that having their presence expanded 10 times from 800 to over 8,000 artworks, nearly all of which are illustrated, has meant that they are satisfying a vast increase in public enquiries in their collection.
The Peter Scott Gallery at the University of Lancaster had previously just 100 artworks on Art UK; they now have 1,500 artworks and the public can see the magnificence of their Modern print collection for the first time.
For museums who had all but stopped adding records to Art UK because staffing pressures meant it was hard to keep their own collection management system up to date, let alone supply an aggregation service, the MDS has been invigorating. Those collections with APIs get regular refreshes on data for no effort on their behalf.
Some collections, like the Ashmolean Museum, the National Museum Wales, Aberdeen Art Gallery, National Museums Northern Ireland, the Fitzwilliam Museum and the V&A have contributed 10s of thousands of new records through the MDS.
To match the great increases in record ingestion rates we had to transform too our digital imaging workflows. This has seen us automate processes and workflows, and use AI-driven programmes to automatically identify and remove colour charts around the borders of images. Our staffing level in data records remains at 2 members of staff, and for images, 2 members of staff too.
The Museum Data Service has allowed Art UK to be able to represent public collections in the UK much more effectively for the same resource.
The transformation for collections who have joined us has been remarkable; collections staff have far more time to focus on their collection priorities, but know their collection is working much more effectively on the Art UK. Their collection can feature in Curations, Stories, Learning Resources and if they choose, appearing in the Art UK Shop and on Bloomberg Guides, earning them valuable income as a not insubstantial bonus for their foresight in choosing the Museum Data Service route to engaging with Art UK.