AI for Cultural Heritage Hub (ArCH)

Project Overview

Cambridge’s GLAM institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) house millions of objects from across the globe, representing an unparalleled repository of cultural and natural history. However, challenges such as analogue formats, handwritten records, fragmented objects, multilingual sources and complex surfaces make much of this data difficult to access.

To address these challenges, the AI for Cultural Heritage Hub (ArCH) will deploy the convening power of Cambridge’s distributed network of collections to create a secure workspace and Community of Practice to empower non-technical users (practitioners and academics) to analyse cultural heritage data securely with AI tools. By encouraging collaboration among curators, researchers, IT professionals, and AI experts, the new hub will prototype adaptive AI solutions to enhance understanding of collections and identify a selection of AI tools to address these problems.

Project contributors:

Amelie Roper, University Library
Sam Brockington, Herbarium and Collections, Connections Communities Strategic Research Initiative (CCC)
Helen Strudwick, Fitzwilliam Museum
Tuan Pham, University Library
Wallace Peaslee, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP)
Huw Jones, University Library
Mathew Lowe, University Museum of Zoology
Suzanne Paul, University Library
Maya Indira Ganesh, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence
Irene Galandra, Collections, Connections, Communities Strategic Research Initiative (CCC)
Joshua Fitzgerald, University Library
Jennie Fletcher, University Library
Anna Breger, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP)