It hasn’t been an easy few years for the cultural heritage/GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums) sector.
The competition for attention is fierce, budgets are tight, and standards for digital experiences are extremely high.
Interested in using Humap for a grant-funded project? Our Bid Kit has all of the information you’ll need for a great application.
Easier said than done, when time, space, and resources are under immense pressure. How are our clients using Humap to democratise heritage?
Layers of London is a £1.3M digital project from the Institute of Historical Research, on the Humap platform. Through user-generated content, the Layers of London project team is changing what it means to engage with the local community and bring new voices into the process of heritage-making.
The interactive map contains over 12,000 crowdsourced records and over 380 collections, as well as modern data and historical map overlays, all contributed by the sizeable Layers of London community and its partner institutions.
Many of our clients use Humap to tell the stories of marginalised groups, historic injustices, and fights for freedom and civil rights. To name just three, Facing the Past uncovers Lancaster’s historic relationship to the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the UK Holocaust Map explores the role that Britain and British people played during that atrocity, and Layers of London has an entire taxonomy dedicated to social justice and the people who fought for it.
Image based on the Charles Booth poverty map, hosted on Layers of London.
"The Humap Team understands digital humanities...[the platform] allowed us to map at-risk and intangible heritage that exist[s] in people's memories, in magazines, flyers and posters."
Don’t settle for just physical exhibitions and traditional curation; enhance your approach with an optimised digital strategy that will revolutionise your outreach.
By representing your collections on a map, you provide a visually engaging and intuitive interface for users. They can navigate through different locations, regions, or themes, enabling them to discover and explore your archives in a more immersive way. Your map can link back to your database and even into your physical collections, ensuring an experience that suits every style of learning.
Turning your database into a map-based resource enhances discoverability, engagement, and educational opportunities, while providing a unique and immersive way for users to explore and connect with your archival collections.
Image from the Wiener Holocaust Library’s Humap: the Refugee Map.
“Our old interactive map webpage had become antiquated and technically too constrained to effectively tell the stories within our collections to a wider audience. Humap solved this in style, with a fresh look and intuitive platform.”
What if you could preserve them forever and allow everyone to explore them?
Layers of London, Coventry Atlas, and the Refugee Map all contain geo-rectified antique maps that can be toggled, explored, and layered on top of one another (and the base map). This is alongside images, videos, and in-depth text exploration of archival documents, museum objects, oral and intangible heritage, and user-generated content.
As Humap supports IIIF rich media, these maps can be magnified and zoomed in on without losing their crisp, HD image.
Digitising collections and sharing them through a cultural heritage interactive map gives them a second life and empowers more people than ever to enjoy them.
Image from Layers of London.
Minimise cost and maximise impact by creating a digital asset that is greater than the sum of its parts.
The UK Holocaust Map (from the The Association of Jewish Refugees) contains co-curated collections from several U.K-based cultural heritage institutions, including:
Coventry Atlas is also a collaborative project, with collections contributed from:
Image from the Association of Jewish Refugees’ Humap instance: the UK Holocaust Map.
“Humap’s platform enabled us to create a digital resource that many different institutions can contribute their archival content to, and for each of these partner organisations to have a visual presence on the site so that it looks visually like the collaborative project that it aims to be.”
Many funding bodies will only give grants to digital projects that build longevity into their planning process.
Our answer to this is Legacy Mode. Interactive maps with Legacy Mode turned on cannot be added to or changed, but they will be maintained by us and accessible for your users.
If more funding is found in the future the instance can be reactivated at any time.
For an example of a project in Legacy Mode, check out Mapping Memory: On The Liverpool Waterfront (pictured).
Layers of London “provides the infrastructure and platform for people to present the stories of their own heritage that have gone unrecorded - these are shown alongside academic research and historical artefacts.”
Several different funding bodies have backed projects that use Humap, demonstrating the value and potential of our platform.
We love projects like these, and we’ve developed a bid kit to help prospective platform users win funding.
Schedule a 45-minute call with our team today for a personalised platform demonstration and quote.
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