By Stefano Bordoni, Research Data Support Assistant.

The Research Data Support team in Library and University Collections has just completed importing the Tower Block UK Archive into Edinburgh DataShare, the University’s digital repository of research data.  This is a large dataset of public mass housing in Britain built between the 1940s and the 1970s. The Tower Block UK project, led by Prof Miles Glendinning (University of Edinburgh), is a Heritage Lottery-supported initiative. It emphasises the social and architectural importance of tower blocks and frames multi-story social housing as fully part of the national heritage. The collection is mostly based on images captured during the 1980s. Its images often represent buildings that are now demolished, which further gives the collection a clear historical value.

Making this vast amount of data open access has been a long challenge for the team, which spanned across seven years. The ingestion in DataShare, supervised by Pauline Ward, resulted in over 3500 new deposits, accounting for about half of the DataShare’s present population. It required curating extensive metadata files (Kat Breen, Pauline Ward and Stefano Bordoni), automating the ingestion through specific coding (Adam Threlfall and Pauline Ward), testing and performing the ingestion (Stefano Bordoni and John Pinto). The activity was also coordinated with the Wikidata community through Wikimedian in Residence, Ewan McAndrew, opening up the path to further sharing the data on Wikimedia Commons (coming soon). It will make the collection accessible to a much wider audience, enhancing the impact of the project.

Header image: Glendinning, Miles. (2023). Tower Blocks UK: Glasgow City Red Road, glw6-05.jpg, 1984 [image]. University of Edinburgh. Edinburgh College of Art. CC BY 4.0. https://doi.org/10.7488/ds/4470.