Collection access to widen

The University has joined a project to enhance global access to Scottish museum collections.

Edinburgh is one of nine Scottish universities involved in the Revealing the Hidden Collections project, which runs until June.

Online access

The project seeks to, for the first time, make information about culturally significant items held within university collections available on the web.

Supported by funding from the Scottish Funding Council, the partner universities will each record electronically and photograph artefacts and treasures from their collections.

These details will be uploaded onto a national database called the Culture Grid.

This online resource pulls together information from museums, archives and libraries across the UK, with the aim of disseminating it using media partners such as Google and the BBC.

Details of items from the University’s musical instrument collection will be among the first to be uploaded to this new technology.

This project is enabling us, for the first time, to provide a ‘finding aid’ for the University’s cultural holdings – addressing a long-standing and ongoing aim to promote widest possible access to our collections.