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.
Rosemary Grennan has co-run the MayDay Rooms since 2015, an archive and educational space in London that seeks to connect histories and documents of social movements and resistance to contemporary struggles.
Outline of the Project
The prject had three different phases:
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The first part saw the development of the Collection of Collections (CoC) software. This phase also involved the integration of the Sloane datasets and selected items from the Sloane Lab Knowledge Base and the British Museum, with the software being established on Raspberry Pi Computers. The population of the nodes was achieved through datascraping sections of the Sloane Lab Knowledge Base, using different selection criteria.
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In the next phase, the project involved three community workshops held at selected local archives. At each location, a CoCo installation was set up, featuring selections from Sloane Lab datasets. The workshops provided hands-on training in the use of digital tools, customising metadata, collaborative annotation, and exploring alternative narratives within the collections. Feedback from these workshops was used to refine the software and workflows.
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The final phase focused on further developing the software and workflows based on the insights gained from the workshops. An online reading room was created to showcase the selected collection and annotated records produced during the workshops. Finally, the launch of this website documents the project, the software, and the reading room.
Key Questions that guided the project are:
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How can distributed models of archiving help create a notion of shared ownership and collective memory around the idea of a national collection?
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How does the distinction between community libraries and archives and national collections play out in the digital sphere?
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Can the idea of ‘collections of collections’, or ‘libraries of libraries’, subvert the idea of a single source in favour of a federation and create better access and shared practice?
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How can practices of community-based annotation and object description build alternative historical narratives, and how can they contribute to different interactions with catalogues regarding Sloane’s collection?
Further Insight into the Project
For more information about the thinking behind the project, you can watch my presentation, Collections of Collections: Building Common Ownership and Shared Archive Practices around the Hans Sloane Collection, given as part of the Sloane Lab and HDSM Darmstadt Seminar Series 2024: Critical and Creative Engagement with Historical Data.
Data Sets Used from the Sloane Lab Knowledge Base and British Museum Digital Collection:
My background is in working with paper archive collections and their digitisation, so I was keen to select items from Sloane’s collection that matched my expertise. Therefore, the selection below primarily consists of works on paper or other printed matter.
There were three nodes overall, consisting of the CoCo software installed on Raspberry Pi computers. Details of the selections from the Hans Sloane Collection hosted on each node can be found below:
Node 01: The first node contained items with historical catalogue entries from Sloane’s original catalogue, as documented in the Sloane Lab Knowledge Base. This node contained 38 items.
Node 02: The second node contained a selection of etchings and other printed material from Sloane’s collections (more details in the Workshop section below). This node had 29 items.
Node 03: The final node, node three, is a selection of drawings and watercolours on either paper or vellum. A large proportion of these depict botanical, ornithological, and zoological subjects. This node contains 122 items.
They were selected through the Sloane LB Knowledge Base using the "Drawing" object type. See here: https://knowledgebase.sloanelab.org/resource/?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fsloanelab.org%2FE55%2Fdrawing
Workshop Discussions, Contributions and Recommendations
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Please note that, due to UCL’s data protection policies, no personal data about workshop participants was recorded, and the locations and hosts of the workshops remain anonymous.
The following write up is based on notes made in the workshops, and additional context about the materials used.
Workshop 01 / Node 01
The workshops were conducted in an cumulative way, with each session responding to the annotations from the previous one. This approach meant that the first workshop started almost as a blank slate, with no annotations present in the collection. One of the key themes of the project is the iterative nature of historical records, so it was important to ensure that this idea was considered from the outset. For this reason, the first workshop focused on previous versions of catalogue descriptions, ranging from Sloane’s original catalogue to the descriptions from the British Museum. You can see examples of this below, the first is the entity from the Sloane Knowledge Base and the second is the records from Sloane’s original catalogue.
The first workshop was held with volunteers and workers at a community archive in London. The group consisted of eight people, all of whom had some experience in various archival processes, from cataloguing to digitising. The session began with a presentation of the project and the work-in-progress software, which was functional but open to feedback to improve its usability and expand the underlying idea. The group then examined the different records mentioned above, exploring the implications of reading them side by side, as well as viewing them alongside the physical material from the archive where the workshop was held.
As it was the first workshop, we had a lengthy discussion about different forms of annotating historical records and, more specifically, how the software could accommodate various methods of record-keeping.
Points brought up in the discussion:
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The productive juxtaposition of historical and contemporary sources, which is more associative than descriptive.
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Annotation as a form of retelling.
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The relationship between a written record and collective or social memory.
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The material or records serve as a starting point for other connections, such as rich annotations where the description becomes more about the person than the item if no other information is known.
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Some annotations focus more on history or the absence of historical records rather than the specific item being examined.
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History relies on and is built upon the traces of the past that have been preserved in various forms, including memory and associated cultural production, which is carried through oral traditions.
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The contrast between the comprehensive ‘enlightenment’ collections and the fragments of history that are often dispersed and brought together by chance.
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The group also reflected on Walter Benjamin's quote from "On the Concept of History": "In every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew."
Explore the Reading Room, an aggregation of all three nodes used in the project, to view the annotations made during the workshops.
Workshop 02 / Node 02
The second workshop was conducted with a working group that looks at the history of print production and is associated with a local history archive.
For this workshop we used the second node which contained a selection of etchings and other printed material from Sloane’s collections. Some of the items are from a Dutch publication called "Meschelyke beezigheeden", published by Ambrosius Scheevenhuizen in 1695, which shows plates of Boekdrkker (book printers) and Plaatdrukker (plate printer). There are also a selection of prints of maps and landscapes of the City of London, including one of a deceased whale on the banks of the Thames at Balckwall Docks. Predominantly though the selection features plates from Marcellus Laroon's "Cryes of the City of London" from 1688. Cryes or cries, refers to the call of different street vendors, peddlers and traders from 17th Century London used to sell their wares. Peter Ackroyd noted that ‘Even as a poor trader died – or left some scanty stock to another – his or her cry was taken up like an echo’ (Ackroyd 2000: 181).
The selection for this project included portraits street sellers and inscriptions of their cries, for examples: Almanack sellers (Buy a new Almanack), Eel sellers (buy my Dishes of great Eeles), Fish sellers (Buy my Flounders), Crab seller (Crab, Crab, any Crab), Mackerel seller (four for six pence Mackrell) and many more.
Shesgreen notes that ‘there has been considerable confusion about (Cryes of the City of London) the various editions and transformation’.... It (the publication) reaches from 1687 to 1821 and comprehends many different publishers, imitators and plagiarism (1982 258-59).
Drawing on the discussion from first workshop, we looked at some of the annotations made by the previous group, in particularly the portrait of Martin Luther (date unknown).
The process of copying, imitation and reuse in print also came up, leading to a discussion about the use of metadata fields such as technique and inscription. This raised questions about the technologies of print distribution and archiving, and what they imply for archival software and the concept of a distributed archive today. It also led to consideration of how other versions of an item might be integrated with the items in the collection. It was also discovered that there was a different version of "Cryes of the City of London" at the Bishopsgate Institute archive.
The annotations from this workshop were the most extensive, with participants adding different annotations to the same item and researching sources far beyond the collection itself.
Examples of these resources included:
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London Labour and the London Poor, a work of Victorian journalism by Henry Mayhew. In the 1840s, Mayhew observed, documented, and described the conditions of working-class people in London. His accounts were originally published as a series of articles in the Morning Chronicle newspaper, which were later compiled into a book.
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The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century by Peter Linebaugh is a seminal work of social history that explores the relationship between crime, class, and capital punishment in 18th-century London. Linebaugh examines the lives of the urban poor who were executed at Tyburn for a wide range of offenses, revealing how the legal system was used to control the burgeoning working class during a time of rapid economic change.
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All other sources are cited in the annotations.
Suggested changes to the software during the workshop included the ability to add custom fields and view different metadata versions from various nodes within the records.
Workshop 03/ Node 03
The final workshop was delivered online, but the node was set up in Delhi, India, in collaboration with an archiving collective there. The first part of the workshop involved remotely setting up Node three on a computer there. The second part involved looking through a selection of Hans Sloane collection on the node, discussing the software, thinking through how to make annotations and testing this out on the collection.
The part of the Hans Sloane collection housed on Node 03 consists of a series of drawings that are part of the British Museum's collection. Among these were many zoological and botanical drawings and paintings, mainly taken from the bound books, often made of vellum. It was noted that while the place of publication for these books and drawings was listed (e.g., Paris, London), the origin of the plants or animals depicted was often not mentioned. This omission, land primacy of textual authority in records, led us to speculate about the unrecorded routes these specimens, artists, or books may have taken. While examining the collection, one group member found a drawing of a woodchuck accompanied by the following entry:
“This Beast was brought from Maryland in North-America, and presented to Sir Hans Sloane, who kept it many Years: By being fed with soft Meats, and Disuse to knaw, its Teeth grew so long and crooked, that it could not take in its Food, so to preserve its Life, they were obliged to break them out.”
This woodchuck, typically found in North America, was either taken to Hans Sloane in London or Jamaica, at a time when he was involved in slavery.
When deciding what kind of annotation could be done with minimal initial data, we began to discuss the idea of lists as a way of recording more speculative information about an object. The group also considered this a useful way to speculate about the routes through which collections become part of national collections and how these routes are often intertwined with various colonial projects.
As a model for the annotation part of the workshop, we thought it would be interesting to find different way of listing features of the items. In the case of botanical items we attempted to identify them if they had not already been identified, and, where identification existed, explore the possible routes that the bird or plant took to be drawn and become part of this collection. Other forms of list making included, vertical poems, recipes, and medical plant properties.
See below examples and looks the reading room for more detailed annotations:
Vivid red
Curved neck
Subtle green and blue wings
Minimal background
Earthy ground
Tall posture
Scarlet Ibis, not a species of curlew as states in the record
It inhabits tropical South America and part of the Caribbean
Drawn in Paris
This item is from a book of Robert’s drawing we believe that he was making these studies from zoological collections and the Jardin de Plantes in Paris
Although we did not have time during the workshop, there was a desire to add material to the node that would shift the focus away from exclusively working on Hans Sloane’s collection. It was expressed that while the participants understood the workshop within the confines of the project and supported the development of the CoCo software, there should be a reciprocal inclusion of other historical items that challenges the authority of Sloane’s collection.
At the end of the workshop, we discussed possible additions to the CoCo software, including the idea of a more flexible listing feature. This feature would not be quite like tagging or using keywords, but rather a freeform list that is less definitive than a description.
Reflections on the Workshops
Given the short timeframe of the project, these workshops primarily served as an opportunity to experiment with modes of community participation using the software and data provided by the Sloane Lab Knowledge Base.
However, I was struck by how quickly participants grasped the potential of the software, engaging with the collection in ways that were both rich and sometimes playful, while still taking its legacy and contentious nature seriously.
All the workshops quickly developed a more narrative and visual approach to building shared data annotations, leading to personal and interpretive responses that were deeply rooted in the collective experience of being together in one space. The first two workshops, held at the sites of the nodes we were working on, had a distinctly collaborative feel, whereas the third highlighted the potential for remote collaboration and hosting through the networks established by the software.
These experiences highlighted the importance of situating digital infrastructure around localized nodes when developing spaces of engagement around the collection. In the case of the first two workshops, this occurred in local archives. The workshops prompted me to consider the possibility of a large network of peered archival collections that could foster collaborative local spaces around digital collections while sharing and maintaining these collections across international geographies. I hope that the CoCo software is a step in the direction of doing this.