Final Report - Congruence Engine: Digital Tools for New Collections-Based Industrial Histories

The capacity to make strong connections between historical objects and sources lies at the heart of this project as it does in the everyday museum and historical practices that it is designed to support. Curators creating displays combine artefacts, images, audio-visual materials and histories often drawn from several heritage organisations. Family and local historians connect records from a diversity of sources that illuminate ancestors and localities so as to establish their genealogy or to understand the past of where they live. Academic historians patiently and critically connect a diverse range of archive sources with existing literature to tell new stories about the past. All rely on connecting different fragments of the past as they sew the quilts of narrative that constitute our local, national and international histories. The difference with this Towards a National Collection project is that it seeks to make such linkages at the national scale (and beyond) of all collections, enabling access together to significant numbers of relevant items from across many GLAM organisations holding heritage in many media. In place of the two-dimensional ranked list of search engines, with Congruence Engine, we have modelled a world in which users will be able to explore data neighbourhoods where a great diversity of information about heritage items from many sources that are deeply relevant to their investigations will be readily to hand – museum objects, archive documents, pictures, films, buildings, and the records of previous investigations and relevant activity.