Collection of Collections is a Community Fellowship project for the Sloane Lab at UCL. It aims to redefine the concept of shared ownership of 'national collections' by working with the digitisation of the Hans Sloane Collections and the Sloane Lab’s Knowledge Base, to develop open-source software and workflows that democratise access and collection management, as well as encourage a decentralised approach to cataloguing and record annotation.
Central to the project is a piece of software, Collections of Collection (CoCo), a local web application that lets you manage and sync items from digital archival collections. CoCo communicates with a local server node and can also interact with other instances of the software, allowing you to browse remote libraries and transfer files between collections. It enables users on different nodes to annotate items, share these annotations, build communal collections, and contribute to each other's metadata, all without losing control over your own collection. See the documentation for Collections of Collection (CoCo) here.
Rather than on a single online collection for a centralised server, the nodes were located in different community and local archives in the UK and India, to highlight both the role of community libraries in the national data and library infrastructure as well as the importance of physical location in the role of encouraging community engagement with online collections. The software was built in collaboration with 0x2620 and then tested and developed in a series of workshops based on nodes located in different community archives. Through these workshops we both developed the software and created a static reading-rooms, with collection and annotation developed through the workshops.
See the About page for more details about the workshops and the Software page to learn how to set up and run your own node.
The Sloane Lab is one of five ‘Discovery Projects’ of Towards a National Collection, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).