Anne McLaughlin
Anne joined the Royal Society in May 2022 as the Project Manager for Phase II of Science in the Making. She has previously held positions at the National Gallery (London), the Parker Library and Senate House Library following the completion of her PhD at the Warburg Institute. She currently is the Digitisation Services Manager for the Library and Archives of Trinity College, Cambridge and is interested in libraries, old books, and new technologies.
Session
Released in April this year, Science in the Making presents 250,000 images from the archives of the Royal Society. This session will introduce the new platform and discuss the way in which it makes use of existing digital infrastructure combined with new open-source technology to represent the 360 years of scientific discovery and exploration in entirely new ways. The site enables a reconceptualisation of the material archive, and facilitates new connections and new collaborations in the digital space.
Presented jointly between the Royal Society and Cogapp, our digital development partner, the paper will begin with a discussion of the development process and evolving workflow through which the traditional structures and systems of the archive are reimagined in a digital space to take full advantage of the flexibility and possibilities afforded by new technology. This includes combining archival information with external data sources such as CrossRef and Wikidata, as well as leveraging the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). This will be followed by a tour of the user-facing features of the site, which have already transformed user behaviour in our reading rooms and influenced institutional practice across the world’s oldest continually-operational scientific society.