 Good morning and welcome to the session organized by the British International Research Institutes. I'm Charles Tripp, Vice President of the British Academy with responsibility for the British International Research Institutes, and I'm very happy to be chairing this session organized by four of the eight institutes linked to the British Academy. The eight British International Research Institutes are long established and vitally important parts of the UK's research infrastructure and the arts in the humanities and in the social sciences. They play a key role, both in the work of UK based researchers, but also, of course, in the collaboration with researchers from the regions in which they're based. And these stretch from Italy and Greece to the Black Sea, Central Asia, across Iran, Iraq, Turkey and the Middle East to North and to East Africa. Since the 19th century, and the British School of Athens is the oldest of them founded in 1886. They have accumulated extraordinary unparalleled archives that reflect the work carried out through them and with them and the changing disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences. During that period with great emphasis on all aspects of archaeology in the first decades of their existence, but gradually accumulating resources, link to ethnography to geography, urban studies, art history botany, natural resource management and sociology. So given the richness of their archives the case for digitizing these both for conservation purposes but also to make them all widely known is very strong. And some of them have been undertaking this for a number of years. But as they proceeded, they realized that collaboration and coordination between them would yield even more significant results, providing links between different fields of knowledge and the work carried out in different places by some extraordinarily distinguished British scholars. And these are just some of the scholars whose names are known and whose work connects with the regions in which the British International Research Institute's work. And as you can see, a number of them worked in different areas now all in some senses linked to the British International Research Institute. So it's an important to suggest that these are links that will be more enriched by the working together and by making people aware of the archives that link them together. However, the practical and technical challenges of coordination on this scale are formidable. And in telling you of their work today, my colleagues from the British International Research Institute would greatly value any feedback from those present who have been grappling with similar challenges and may indeed have overcome them. However, without further ado therefore I'd like to introduce my four colleagues who will be making the presentations today. The first to speak will be John Bennett, who's the director of the British School of Athens. Be followed by Alessandra Jovenko, archivist at the British School at Rome. Followed by Nurdan Atalan-Cherismas, digital repository manager at the British Institute of Ankara, and finally Charlotte Rouche, Professor Emeritus of Digital Hellenic Studies at King's College and very closely connected to the Society for Libyan Studies. Each of them will speak consecutively in that order, and we'll be happy to take questions and comments in the last 10-15 minutes of this session. Well, everybody, thank you for joining us in this session. As Charles mentioned, the British School of Athens, the BSA as I'll refer to it from now on, is the oldest of the BIRI founded in 1886. It has a main base in central Athens with satellite research centers at Knossos on Crete. Like all the BIRI, it maintains a London office at the British Academy's premises there in London. I'm presenting as director as an indication of the importance which the BSA attaches to this programme of digitisation. But I emphasise that this is a team effort, largely carried out by a team who are listed on the slide. Our assistant director, our archivist, who I know is joining this session and will be available in the Q&A afterward to shed more light. Our IT officer, a fixed term data manager and various volunteers. As an institute founded in 1886, we've obviously accreted a very large internal archive comprising our corporate records and various excavation and fieldwork records. But we've also acquired personal papers, including those of George Finley, a prominent 19th century Phil Hellenist, the Noel Baker family, a British family based in Greece, following independence. And the major acquisition was the archives of the British, the Byzantine Research Fund. A unique collection of architectural drawings, photographs and notebooks created in the late 19th to mid 20th century by a small team of British architects who were trained in the arts and crafts tradition. Another major collection is the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies image collection, over 7000 items comprising their photographic collection collected between 1891 and 1967. And these comprise negatives, glass and film in a variety of sizes, as well as photographic prints and glass lantern slides. Our collection management system is the proprietary software EMU, now owned by Axial. It's an object orientated database with which covers documents, objects, images, etc. And it was purchased just over 10 years ago in order to try to integrate as many of the BSA data types, but also as many of the processes administrative and research processes that the BSA carries out. Data entry and cleanup are constantly ongoing, and the system runs on site with regular backups. And just to give you an indication of the size of what's already in EMU, we have any catalog comprising over 150,000 records, parties of 17 and a half thousand sites of 5700 and multimedia running to 183,000. And there are of course various access restrictions protecting either material that isn't as sensitive, or of course records that relate to individuals, individual staff. Plans to make the collection accessible when digitised were initiated several years ago, in fact pioneered on the Byzantine research fund, as well as digitisation of the catalogue of our large archaeological collection at Knossos. But they were realised in 2019 with the launch of our portal digital collections, which offers a bespoke interface to the EMU data. And this was significantly expanded during the lockdowns, partly because of a diversion of effort from things that could not be carried out during lockdown, but also as a service since of course lockdown prohibited travel for many people to come and access them on site. Each new collection when it's mounted is accompanied by a short blog post, which we call archive stories, and this draws out an aspect of the of the collection. There have been multiple posts on the Society for Motion and Hellenic Studies image collection on William Jell on Keppel Craven and Petrie's notebooks, as well as on early excavation notebooks from the BSA. I'm just chosen to show static examples, but I urge you to go and visit our website to sit to try the dynamic interface that you have there. Taking the Byzantine research fund as an example, we have three different modes in which you can browse it, a grid mode, which you see in the top left, a list mode in the middle, and a map, which is obviously particularly useful for coverage of particular sites or particular regions. And taking the SPHS Society for Motion and Hellenic Studies archive as an example, we can see the map view here, and it's possible to do a detailed search on various terms. Here a particular creator, a particular location, refined to a particular image number that I happen to know the number of, and that reveals this particular image, which as you'll note, is in modern Turkey. And this is another point that emphasizes Charles's point at the beginning of the overlap between our different archives in the Biri. Another example is Digital Mycenae, which we launched in June 2020, close to the anniversary of the centenary of the BSA excavation starting at that site. It's already been shortlisted for an award in Apollo magazine, but as an example of digital unification of archives, archives that are physically located in separate places. It's not a Cambridge and Athens, but searchable through a single interface. Another potential that digitization offers for us is the opportunity to present a coherent selection of items or a narrative around a collection through virtual exhibitions. That is a guided approach, which contrasts with an open search for information through the search feature. So here is a standalone exhibition on pure nature, which draws on the Byzantine research fund materials to highlight the interplay between Byzantine buildings and their environment, and also the use of nature and natural features in ornament. Individual static pages here are linked directly through to items in the in emu through our digital collections platform. Similarly, using making full use of the digital collections platform, a set of webcasts to be a say produced marking the 1821 2021 by Centenary is available offers a series of short commentaries on objects, marking that particular by Centenary. Now the potential obviously for extending this is very large and I just give two examples in the top right. We recently found received funding for a three year postdoc fellowship on modern Greek studies to study and oversee the digitization of a significant part of George Finley's papers. And this will join a very large body of digital material which is going online in association with the the by Centenary. And in the bottom left, of course, the potential for unifying a distributed archive here the notebooks in particular of early of early 19th century British traveler Sir William gel. These are widely distributed after his death and exist in the BSA in the British school at Rome, the British Museum, the in Oxford and Bristol as well as other locations. And of course digitization offers the potential to unite these virtually to inform study of travel, social history and other aspects. So in conclusion, I hope I've made a clear and make clear the rich content of the BSA collections and how we have begun to make those accessible, discoverable and useful usable by others. Digitization, of course, as Charles mentioned, preserves the often fragile almost always unique original, but also makes a unique resource available in multiple locations simultaneously. The Berry collections have great potential to inform the historiography of our disciplines, particularly archaeology, inform social history, especially around travel and reception. And of course, studies to studies of heritage, particularly on data site data on particular sites, or monuments no longer existence, for example, the Byzantine monuments of festival and the key before great fire of 1917. There are many overlaps among the Berry, including in the SPHS image collection, so the potential for making collections accessible and discoverable to a wider audience, academic and otherwise are considerable. Thanks very much for your attention. Good morning, everybody. My name is Alessandra Jovenko, and as Charles has anticipated, I'm the Archivist at the British School of Rome, which is a British Research Institute for the Humanities and the practice of the fine arts and architecture based in the Valley of Julia in Rome. It is a research gateway to Italy, Europe, and the Commonwealth. The BSR has always been a creative, vibrant and transcultural community where there are no boundaries between disciplines. Interdisciplinarity is the driving force behind all our activities. Founded in 1901 as a School of Archaeology, History and Letters for the promotion of research in Italy and about Italy, it broadened its scope and mission by receiving a Royal Charter in 1912 and launching an ambition program of scholarships in the fine arts the following year. Since then, the BSR has evolved by adapting itself to numerous political, cultural and social changes and addressing the challenges of the present and the future. The BSR collections include a broad range of material. Sorry. Here I am. Okay. The BSR collections include a broad range of materials, from red books to paper records, photographic collections, museum objects, manuscript notebooks, course cards, engravings, and other objects created and accumulated over the course of the institution's multidisciplinary history. Many of these collections were equipped or donated by directors, assistant directors, staff members, and scholars. Others were purchased. I speak on behalf of a group of colleagues as the results we have achieved since 2002 in the digital domain are built on the expertise and knowledge of many, including the contribution of other short term colleagues, interns and IT developers. Each object, whether a photograph, map, or drawing, has been catalogued in Mark 21 on COHA, our open source information library system. This is the main database from which we are migrating our data. The archival resources are being cataloged through the archival software system currently in use archive space, and we provide information about our corporate records, as well as excavation archaeology records. We are considering the export of metadata and description from this platform as well. Our records are also available through the Erbis catalog, a discovery tool, providing coordinated access to the resources of 22 international research libraries in Rome, with over 2 million records. Metadata exported from the library catalog are processed and migrated onto the BSR digital collections platform, which was launched in October 2020. It is the culmination of a long process began many years ago, and from which we have learned much in terms of ways to achieve our objectives as they evolved. We had an old platform, but we felt we had to develop further and were able to do that thanks to the rapid developments in technology. The technical environment has changed so radically in the last few years that much can be done far more easily than before. The new web page includes a highlight section in which research projects, theme based presentations, virtual exhibitions and new digital content are presented and can be browsed in a more engaging manner. So why Islandora? Islandora 7 has been identified for various reasons, one of which is that is an open source digital assets management system. Although requiring technical support, it ensures compliance with metadata and format standards, facilitates the management of complex bodies of digital material, and allows for the ingestion of various types of digital content, including audio visual resources. More than 28,300 records are available for consultation from 10 collections belonging to two physical repositories, the photographic archive and the library and archive special collections. These are arranged according to their provenance. The digitization of the items in our collections has sometimes been run in-house, and one of our aims is to invest in self-development and build capacity. Hosting server and backup are run on site. Access to the admin panel is provided through a front-end web interface. Our digital collections website has brought our unique historic collections to a global audience, providing access to our photographic archives, as well as a selection of maps, drawings and engravings from our special collections. These can be browsed in various ways, not least through the faceted search which shows up on the left-hand side of each results page, and which allow users to narrow down the results. As you can see on the top left corner of the slide. Not everything has been scanned and made available. Some parts of collections, or in a whole collections, remain to be evaluated and assessed, primarily in the context of issues relating to copyright. And this you can see in the image bottom right part of the slide. Since the outset, we have considered high quality metadata as essential in terms of facilitating the research community. We are confident we can benefit enormously from the richness of other sets of metadata made available by other B-re institutions. We have also only adopted international standards for cataloging and publishing digital content to ensure interoperability and focus on the quality of data content, structure and format. We consider digital resources as objects to preserve as much as the physical ones. We're paying particular attention therefore to instability and fragility of digital formats and the problem of sustainability. So, from one standard to another, as you can see from this slide, we are mapping metadata from Mach 21 to Modes, which is this image in the center, according to a customized template. And then we associate the relevant digital objects. Thanks to this meticulous work, we are able to process the migration of collections in batch processes. And this is the island or a backend of the Libya record examined in the slides above, where it is possible to see the various standards and formats on which the digital repository can be built. This is how a user will access the record you've seen before. Librarians and archivists are in a very good position to know what data are useful and the order in which they may be displayed. We have added the fields that users will find useful and we believe they will. But we are sure the needs may change over time and some data may be more appealing than others to researchers and broader audiences. Speaking of B-Ray records, we are sure we can build digital capacity through the exchange of information about best practices, cataloging and digitization. The few meetings we had with B-Ray colleagues were very inspiring and we are convinced we will continue to learn a lot from sharing knowledge, experience and mistakes. We are building a community and a culture of mutual exchange where our aim is to help each other grow. For example, we have learned from the Society of Libyan Studies that it would be ideal to have a URI embedded into each record. This would be very useful in order to make our resources more findable. We have learned from Athens how complex the process can be for the digitization of a lanterns light collection in relation to their society for the promotion of a Linux studies image collection. This collection is the sister to our society for the promotion of Roman studies, which is in the BSR Photographic Archive. We have learned from Ankara about the potential of linked open data and archaeological excavation data. Distributed amongst the B-Ray is a great deal of knowledge, though we know that each institution's holdings are unique and identity and diversity have to be preserved. We find that very often our resources complement one another and constitute a powerful body of knowledge for the history of British research in the Mediterranean. In this case, it is the overlapping relationships that represent real outfit value and make the whole more than the parts. Thank you very much. I'm handing over to Nudan. Thank you very much organizers and John and Alessandra. Today I will give you brief information about British Institute at Ankara and Digital Repository System. British Institute at Ankara supports and enables and encourages research in Turkey and the Black Sea region in a wide range of fields, including archaeology, ancient and modern history, heritage management, social sciences and contemporary issues in public policy and political sciences. It was founded in 1947 and BIA was incorporated in the 1956 cultural agreement between the Republic of Turkey and the United Kingdom. BIA has archives and collections since 1947. BIA David French Library houses books, tazes, maps, journals and audiovisual materials. It is recognized as the foremost library in its field in Ankara and one of the two best in Turkey. It is used by British, Turkish and other international scholars and students. Collections created during the research activities, especially archaeological excavation and surveys in Turkey. Pottery, squeeze, photographic animal bone reference collection, botanical reference collection, including herbarium, wood and charcoal specimens, archaeological documents and drawings, map collection preserved physically and they digitized since 2000 and in 2006 they created a beast box system. Now you can reach from our website. I will send the link. Digitalization activities done by different scholars and people between 2000 and 2018. At the end of 2018, Digital Repository Office set up and started to build a repository. First step was making an assessment of all our archives because some of them were digitized and had a database. This assessment helped us to understand our metadata schema and our controlled vocabularies. Now we need to choose the software for repository and library, but it was difficult to choose one system for library collections and library and the collections. So we decided to use COHA, the open source system for library and Islandora for digital repository system. So it is open source flexible and then also the British School of Rome was using this system. So we are sharing our knowledge in order to use this system better. Installation is completed, but configurations for taxonomies are continuing. So we couldn't open our Islandora system yet, but we are planning to open it in autumn and also library system will be open soon. Open access is important in the digital cultural heritage institutions, especially for library, archive and museums. BIA is an institute working as a library, archive and museums also is a research institute. So we need to deal with both legacy data and the born digital data. The aim is to create open access repository. So we are trying to implement fair principles which is findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. So our problem was how are we going to open our digital data with this repository. So repository will have OIS mechanism to harvest data and share data with other platforms. We choose qualified Dublin Core metadata schema because we had different type of materials in our collection. So we need to decide identifiers for our collection and for digital data. We checked the DOI and handle and we decided to use handle for our collections. Now you can see our prefix when we open our digital records, each record will have handle ID. Also when we do this process we checked our physical folders and changed with asset free folders for physical preservation. In this time we were checking our physical item IDs, record IDs and also adding those IDs into the digital system in order to make it findable for physical material. We also checked control vocabularies like Getty, Library of Congress, Fast, VF and tried to adopt this into Islandora and link with our database. Also the important thing is the reusable data. So we decided to use creative common licenses for digital items. As a research institute we are also creating born digital data for our project. So we need to think about the data management plan for our born digital data. And during some of the projects we are starting to think about how to record and keep those data during the project after an end of the project. As I said we are trying to use international vocabularies but sometimes those are not fit in our cases. So we choose, we try to create our vocabularies for creator, person and ancient settlements. In this slide you see our names, John Garstang, Seton Lloyd, David Branch and we find the auto-ic links and VF and Wikidata and Library of Congress. We started to work on this list and we made a collaboration with Wikimedia UK and Turkey and now creating Wikidata links and also providing data to Wikidata so other cultural institutions can use our data. Also we made a collaboration with Society of Libyan Studies, British School of Rome, British School of Athens in order to create linked open data for all British schools. And so you will see our ancient settlements. The ancient settlements had a problematic way in Turkey because the village names also changing in Turkey so we are creating our ancient settlements list. Thanks to our scholar interns and volunteers for their time and effort because verification is manually and needs time and patience. We tried to do automatic but there was problems. In order to link our data, we are checking all related items and finding information in the collections. Collecting and verifying information are time consuming and sometimes need experienced people. In this case we need to deal epigraphic data and it has different terminology and abbreviations. Archivist needs to work with epigraphs collaboratively to avoid mistakes. Now the aim is to link the data in the collection. As you see we have a squeeze archive and then this as a photograph in our archives and it is published in this our book and it is also it has also transcription so you need to find all this data and link in the digital repository system. We are digitizing our hard iron collection and had a difficulty to choose the metadata and taxonomy by your cultural collections, especially flora are using Darwin core metadata and flora taxonomy. So we need to configure our system to add proper vocabulary set as you see the gbiff as a taxonomy for flora but still you need to work on flora of Turkey for your vocabulary. We need to think physical preservation in order to physical preservation we mount we are mounting specimens from newspaper to the acid free papers and I'm taking photographs at the same time we need to think about the digital preservation. So the photographer is taking photos in raw format and JPEG format. So we need to convert raw files to T for the digital preservation and also JPEG files for dissemination. As I said via is a library archive and museum and a research institute so we are dealing both legacy data and born digital data at the same time also both have challenges to organize manage and preserve. Digitized data had different dpi and formats, like of standards and controlled vocabulary vocabularies for some data needs additional effort. We cannot use the control vocabularies directly. We need to adapt and create our vocabularies and also each country has different regulations for archaeological or cultural heritage data. So we need to learn those policies before open our data to in digital platform. We need to learn archive museum and excavation regulations for countries language is another difficulty for archival records transcribing handwritten documents needs time and effort. All digitized data and catalog information needs to mapping to proper metadata format that the cleaning and verification our time consuming and needs archivist archaeologist and information managers needs additional trainings and support. So they need to work together. We need to choose proper software and think about the storage and backup issues. Also the main problem in the digital world. How are we going to preserve our digital files. Are we going to convert all digitized jpeg files to tiff format. And for the projects we are trying to create our data management plan for born digital data. Each archive is unique and you need to work on it. Also it is a long journey and not easy but it is opportunities to learn more and find your own way. Archaeologist archivist researchers needs to think about how to organize and preserve the digital data. Also it is a teamwork. Cultural heritage institutions have limited funding in order to save time energy. We started to share our knowledge and experience with other breeze. So it is good to work together and spend our time to create new things together to increase visibility. We will share our information with national and international partners like Europe, Yana and Wikimedia. We already made collaborations with several partners like archaeology data service and Ariadne plus. We also partner of Seattle saving European digital archaeology data from digital dark age and translated the fair guidelines into Turkish. The team is to find more ways to work collaboratively with national and international partners. Sharing knowledge and learning more is helpful because we all have limited time to do something so that is fine. That is better to find collaborative ways. With the help of our team members interns volunteers we are working to organize manage and preserve our archives and digital data. During the pandemic we worked online for most of the time and data creation and verification process also done by online. Thanks to all of them and for you to listen. And now I would like to pass to Charlotte to talk about Society Libyan Studies. We are speaking in as you probably realized in historical order and the Libyan Society is the youngest of the organization speaking today. It only founded in 1969. And in many ways we are lucky because we can benefit from the experience of others. Like many things it happened in a way by chance. It's the chance consequence of the fact that the British found themselves in charge of Libya after the Second World War. And there is extremely if you go to the National Archives website there's extremely interesting account from papers in the National Archives about the initial response of the British Army when they find themselves among all these antiquities. Luckily several of them were in fact archaeologists. The initial idea was that whatever needed doing would be done under the guidance of the British School of Rome, which is a much larger institution. But more and more activity as everywhere grew archaeological activity grew and grew. And so in 1969 a separate society was was set up as a consequence of this history. We don't have a fine building to show you we know we don't have any land. We don't have a location in Libya or in London. But we do have an immensely dynamic group of people all over the world who are interested in Libya and above all very good friends in Libya in the antiquities departments and in the universities. And in the way archaeology being an archivist is rather like being an archaeologist in that you find things that you don't know you don't choose what to find you have whatever you have. And so there's an exotic accumulation of items that the Libyan society has which is still growing and which is important because it records a past which even since the Second World War has been vanishing very fast. I'll run you very quickly through what you've seen. This is the Libyan society. This is a narrative of the history. And the what we've ended up with is a collection of books, which have been accumulated in various ways but some of which are extremely valuable books from archaeological archaeological accounts which are not found anywhere else in England. And also a collection of archives of all kinds, as you will know, archives come in every shape and form. But in both cases, we don't have a specific home. We are the guests of the institutions which house the library at the School of Oriental and African Studies and the archives in Leicester. So it became increasingly clear that we needed to think about digitization. Not least because we don't have a permanent home. And also because over the years the threat to the heritage has increased. And while we all think of things like war. It's very interesting how rapidly simple weather can lead to the deterioration and loss of valuable antiquities all over the world. And but to specific case of Libya, of course, was transformed in 2011. And this meant that from 2011 onwards it became extremely difficult for any of our archaeological colleagues to operate in country. And so the proper use of our resources seemed to us to be to pay more attention than we had to all these holdings which we had accumulated. We started where you actually start far behind the other three, we started with cataloging. So a very basic and primitive thing that we did first was to find a student who would create a Zotero catalog of the holdings in our library. It was an important first step of knowing what we have and publications like this one from 1926 are very rare. Then we turned to the archive. The archives had gradually accumulated and had ended up being held by the library of the University of Leicester. When I say held by the library there physically in a different building but they are the library takes responsibility for them. And the library enabled us to find an archivist. And we said the first thing we had to do was have a professional archivist provide a professional catalog at the same time undertaking some conservation steps. That information went into the University of Leicester's library catalog, which isn't the easiest place to find it. And we then asked that with their help we exported the material in XML to the digital laboratory at King's where we were already building simultaneously building a gazetteer of locations in Libya. And so the collection catalog is now sitting within that framework in a Django database and is therefore there to be built and developed and explored. You will see an entry here where one entry in the archive catalog is 594 photographs. This is simply the very first step towards the digitization and the addition of images to the online catalog. The original catalog will still be the key finding mechanism for the physical objects. So we're right at the beginning of what we want to need to do. We can't fund a total program of digitization and cataloging of everything. There's so much to do. We're very much hoping that students and scholars will be encouraged to come and work on these materials developing research projects and undertaking cataloging and research and digitization as part of their own research projects. That would seem to be the most manageable way of working. And we're benefiting enormously from being part of the Biri family. We can learn from everyone the most useful thing and learning what the mistakes are of course we're lucky to be turning up late in the day. But as you saw, in Rome, for example, they hold photographs taken in Libya in the 1940s. They can provide much of the metadata about the locations and the objects photographed. They can provide the image itself. What we produce together will be much better than anything we produce separately. And so what we need now really is to evolve or to develop a system of interchange for the information held by all the different Biri. And I think that's a picture of us really plugging our information in in such a way that it can be identified by others. So that's what we're hoping to achieve over to Charles. Charlotte, thank you very much. But thanks you to all of you. I like the picture at the end. It's to remind people of the analog technology that underpinned all this in the first place. But thank you very much all of you for giving such an extraordinary rich and interesting picture of the activities that you're all undertaking. But also, of course, the links between you and the openings and possibilities and lessons learned for the other Biris too. And I hope for, in many senses, in the hall as well. I think we have one question but from Alan Sadlo who asked early on about a standard identifier that allows people digital items have a standard identifier to allow search across different collections. He thought it may have been answered but if anybody wants to answer that because it did strike me when you were talking about searchability, whether that would be something that would be worth saying something about or clarifying. I can answer for the British Institute at Ankara. We are going to use handle instead of do I that I will be the persistent identifier for each record. So we hope it will be much more sustainable in the future. I suppose it does depend upon the what you find the most convenient in some ways. There's another questions just come up which is of course not unexpected in this past year or so which is curious to know how the pandemic has impacted on all your activities and whether it's influenced or steered recent priorities. So it's to get a sense and I think you're done mentioned this in relation to Ankara but I think also Charlotte as well. So, has it had a material has had a material effect on the way in which you conduct things or reminded you that these are things that still need to be done. Charlotte. I think it helped us. I mean in some ways, it came at the right moment for us because it helped us to focus our not enormous resources on this particular aspect. It suddenly brought into the foreground, the importance, something which started of course with before that over the last 10 years the importance of recording this material preserving it, getting it out and putting it in a format where colleagues in Libya can have access has become increasingly evident. Yes, can I also add that the lockdown and the pandemic has encouraged us to be more proactive in digitalization projects and as kind of made us think more about what to digitize what to what as the priority in terms of collections and so it has been kind of catalyst I maybe just pushed us to to think more about digital collections and also as created this community between this discussion between theories which is what was very positive and inspiring and really we hope to continue on this road. I was going to ask a question actually which I think that Charlotte mentioned about the Gazettea reminded me is that if I'm doing search ability across platforms and culture you think about place names and how they've changed in history and in languages and how do you cope with that I mean if for instance Turkey, which has gone through different languages different empires different and different place names in some form or another. Do you have some way of dealing with that easily. Yeah, I mean that was the main problem for us because I mean we started to work on the gazettea's we checked the gazettea's and some of the material that is related to one settlement, we couldn't find that settlement in the known gazettea there so you need to work on and find the location and coordinate for that site. So that was the difficult part. And now we are verifying all our data. It is approximately 2000 settlement ancient settlement in our archive related with the ancient gazettea also which we are talking with Charlotte about the gazettea so we don't want to create gazettea again, the tool let's say, but we have this data set so we are trying to find out the ways. Other institutions Libya or Rome or Athens cannot spend a lot of time to create the same data that came from Turkey. So that was the big problems but we are checking all international gazettea's and find out the way. But sometimes you have to do it manually so you need you require human resource to do it. So, but they are talking about some programming languages and we tried. But it didn't work well so we are doing manually, but we are hoping to share this data, at least with wiki data in the first place and after that, what we can create a bitty places information data set, let's say. I think also it's important just to bear in mind that it's that this is not a situation just for standardization in our archives, we have evidence about place names, which needs to be recorded and made visible. And there's this tension between trying to identify. Oh, I wonder where this really is. And this is the place that this man referred to in this way. I'm wondering in in Libya, there are publications which refer to Barbary, because of course that's the Barbary Coast. Well that's a place. It's an it's you won't find it in a modern in a modern map, but it needs to be reflected in a gazettea of places. And I think it's very important to balance the, the locating of things with the recording of our specific data. I have a question from Jill, using coha with archival collections. Do you have any top tips in other words, from your experience I think Alessandra. Yes, I think this is for me. And yeah, we're using coha, which is a library software system to catalog photographs so each single item is being catalog using mark 21 as a format standard. And, of course, we can also describe a collection of items by using the mark 21 standard, but for archival resources, as I said, we use archive space so it's just a matter to understand how to migrate these resources from different systems and how to display them on to digital asset management system, which is island aura. But actually, we find, we found out that mark 21 is very granular, so allows for more detailed way comes to describing the content of a picture and also create links, hopefully with the gazetteer. And, and yeah, so I think I have answered this question. Thank you very much. Another question from Neil Grindley said, obviously, you've been talking about the benefits of collaboration and the way in which the berries assist each other. Do you have any plans to more formally join up and share infrastructure perhaps address the challenge of digital preservation. There's a leading question. I've always hoped it seems to me that that's absolutely the big question coming towards us, as in so many institutions. I've always hope that parents at the British Academy would like to open a lovely sustainability center for us, but it is a job that it would be sensible to look at jointly. I'm feeling the slide of the telephone exchange was geared to the British Academy actually. Yeah, you've got it. But it's certainly true. I mean, given the fact that you are sharing knowledge of how things are done sharing different systems. Clearly, the question does come up in the end about how that can just be sustained for for the benefit of all. So both the four of you who are talking today but also those the other four who are who are also beginning to find out about these things. Yeah. John was it was were you going to mention something then I wasn't sure you had your hand up. No I was back a couple of questions is fine. Okay, that's fine. I mean, the other question which I suppose is typical one coming from the British Academy which is that clearly all of you have had to rely on and been able to rely on some amazingly gifted teams of people but teams don't come free. And so in a sense, there is a funding question which I suppose is also something that's quite good to air in such a conference which is, have you thought about yet applying to particular funds foundations that might be sympathetic to this aspect of your work. You might get some echoes from other people who are attending this conference as well. Well, I just say that the three year postdoc that we just received funding for starting in October has a particular aim to work with the George Finlay papers and included within that bit was sufficient funds to do the physical production, but also a six month project assistant who will work with our archivist to catalog those and probably provide the metadata. In other words, making them entirely useful, while the, the postdoc will actually as it were cover the academic and draw out the significance of all of those so I mean I think the, the crucial thing is that it's actually quite difficult to get funding just to stick the things on the scanner. It's better linked to a research question but on the other hand the big need is to get as much digitized as possible. And then of course you have the human resource aspect of cataloging and making that available. Absolutely. Well that's very encouraging I think we should be bringing this session to an end but I wanted to thank all of you really for such excellent presentations and I think it's given all of us even those who are quite aware of what the berries do. Even more awareness of the richness of your collections and what you're undertaking at the moment which is a quite challenging set of tasks but what's really encouraging is I think the way you're working together and as you said sharing your knowledge with other people are just embarking on this area as well and I like to think that presenting in such a conference you will get some feedback from people who've had to face similar challenges that you have which is to think about how do different collections speak to each other. How does that make it more accessible but really