Linked Art II: Developing Community, Practice, and Scholarship

'Linked Art II: Developing Community, Practice, and Scholarship' brings together University researchers with experts from some of the leading art museums in the UK and US. The project will engage with scholars and practitioners to highlight the opportunities afforded by connected collections as data, and establish where new digital methods and tools are needed to enable novel research. Linked Art II will engage with cultural institutions to examine how structured data can contribute towards digital challenges, including improving the accessibility of collections, and increasing the range and diversity of institutions and material available to the public. The foundation of the project is the development and application of Linked Data to cultural heritage collections, with an emphasis on works of art and their provenance. Linked Data will provide a platform for multi-modal digital scholarship across these rich collections; Linked Art II will continue a partnership setting an international agenda to realise this platform through a common data model, building capacity for future collaborative implementations and research investigations. In the first phase of this work, a research network was formed to bring together experts who are collaborating on the design of the common data model. The Linked Art II project continues this work, but also seeks to trial and test the model through a series of feasibility studies and proof of concept implementations. These 'exemplars' will be developed in collaboration with project partners and the wider Linked Art community; two exemplars will be selected via an open call for collaboration. The project will publish documentation and explanation of the exemplars on the Linked Art website so that others can understand and learn about the practicalities of Linked Art adoption. The project is led by the University of Oxford and the J. Paul Getty Trust, with project partners from the UK and US including: the American Numismatic Society, the National Gallery (London), the National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.), Newfields, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the University of the Arts London, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Yale Center for British Art. The project will advocate Linked Art adoption amongst the cultural heritage community in the UK and US through a series of outreach workshops, disseminating discussion points and conclusions from the network in easily understood and readily available forms, and enabling the wider sector to benefit from the transformative step-change offered by Linked Art as it evolves.