The Ruskin Whitehouse Collection: Digital Collections Solution - AWARD

n 2019, Lancaster University purchased The Ruskin Whitehouse Collection with support from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, Art Fund and others. Launching a digital collections platform is a critical aspect of The Ruskin's mission to open the collection to a wider audience than ever before, locally and globally. The digital collections platform falls under The Ruskin's wider Digital Strategy, which we have accelerated in response to both the Covid-19 pandemic; and because in 2021, The Ruskin Whitehouse Collection was removed to storage while the museum building is redeveloped. The Digital Strategy includes our aim to digitally re-connect Ruskin collections worldwide, working with existing partners at the Yale Center for British Art and The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in the USA, and Birmingham Museums & Galleries, and the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Manchester in the UK, amongst others. The digital collections platform is an enabling step toward that ambition.

While the collection will remain underground until 2023, continued public access will be facilitated through partner exhibitions, digital and public programmes. All activity, including the digital collections platform, should meet the needs of existing users and create opportunities for audience development amongst key user groups, who represent a variety of interest and knowledge levels. These include:

General Publics: both the curious, looking for collection engagement without a specific outcome in mind, through browsing and discovery; and who know what they are looking for;

Families: adults with early years and primary-age children, looking for immersive and playful experiences that capitalise on Ruskin's intensely visual story-worlds;

Teaching/Learning: including home education, schools, colleges and HE, looking for content to enhance the national or place-based curricula, and/or course development;

Special Interest Groups: ranging from climate change activists, to Lakeland local history, looking to engage thematically cross-collection;

Specialist Researchers: including scholars of Ruskin and nineteenth-century literature, culture and science; interdisciplinary researchers; curators.

The digital collections platform should, through functionality and design, engage and empower publics and researchers (including the optimisation of the research potential of the collection via practices and tools compliant with the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF)); facilitate both wide-ranging and deep engagement with the collection; and communicate its contemporary relevance.