On Tuesday 4 February 2025, BILNAS Archivist Dr. Anne Marie Williamson co-presented a seminar, along with colleagues from the British School at Athens and the British Institute in Eastern Africa, related to Islamic Heritage Collections as part of the Virtual Islamic Art History Seminar Series (VIAHSS).

These institutes are British International Research Institutes (BIRIs), global research centres with a focus on arts, humanities, and social sciences, with archival collections covering the Mediterranean, Türkiye and the Black Sea, Africa, the Middle East/South West Asia and North Africa, Iran and Central Asia.

Since 2022, the institutes have been working together to adopt Linked Open Data (LOD) standards and methodologies in order to identify links between their collections, with the eventual aim of developing a joint discovery portal based on the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles, funded by The British Academy.

In this presentation, the BIRI speakers demonstrate that through cross-institutional search, innovative links between collections can be found and research questions better investigated.

To illustrate this potential before the new digital portal is completed, the BIRIs are developing digital stories, using StoryMaps, to show how hidden, understudied materials can be highlighted, moving beyond traditional area-studies boundaries, for a better understanding of the Islamic world throughout history.

Founded in May 2020, the Virtual Islamic Art History Seminar Series (VIAHSS) brings together a diverse community of researchers from around the world through its virtual seminars and workshops. VIAHSS hopes to expand the understanding of Islamic art history and discuss those geographical areas and time periods that have previously been defined as marginal.

These talks are organised by Wellesley College, Massachusetts and the University of Oxford.

Speakers:

Jessica Holland – British School at Athens (BSA)
Dr David Maina – British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA)
Dr Anne Marie Williamson – British Institute for Libyan and Northern African Studies (BILNAS)

Click on this link to watch the presentation on the BILNAS YouTube channel.
 Or click here to watch it on the VIAHSS’s VIMEO channel.