Exploring Outreach through Medieval Seals

The proposed project, Exploring Outreach through Medieval Seals (ExOMS), will offer an important test-case approach to the ways in which an involved academic research project can be also applied beyond its immediate academic audience. The proposed project draws upon the AHRC-funded Seals in Medieval Wales (SiMeW) project and will reapply material and expertise gathered in that project and place it in new settings. In particular, it seeks to respond to the following identified aims of this funding stream, namely, - To enhance the value and benefits of AHRC-funded research beyond academia - To encourage and facilitate a range of interactions and creative engagements between arts and humanities research and a variety of other user communities, including, in this instance, third sector and heritage, voluntary and community groups and the general public. The project also anticipates interaction with business and commercial interests. The SiMeW project team are exceptionally well-placed to provide an effective link between a variety of interested but not as yet interconnected parties. As the largest and most significant publically-funded seal recording project ever undertaken in the UK, SiMeW has unique experience of recording and analysing seals in a digital context which can be shared with the totality of the sigillographic research community in the UK. In contrast to many previous projects, SiMeW has not been restricted to a particular collection or repository, but has worked with material held by repositories ranging from local record offices to the British Library, and as such has an understanding of the challenge of merging sigillographic data from different institutions. Moreover, SiMeW has gathered material from a range of different types of collections, such as records of monastic houses and private estates, each with contrasting characteristics. Finally, SiMeW recorded seals from c.1150 to 1550, providing a remarkable overview of the surviving medieval material. All of these highly positive developments can be brought to the benefit of academic and non-academic end-users. The proposed work for ExOMS will significantly extend the outreach of the current project and will do so by addressing a number of separate cohorts as well as discrete kinds of activity. The project team consider this to be an excellent opportunity to disseminate the original research beyond an academic community and ensure that the benefits of the research will reach a number of different end-users. With further funding through ExOMS, the current SiMeW team will reach out to the diverse community of academic researchers, heritage professionals, local and family historians, metal-detectorists, educationalists, businesses and living history enthusiasts that we know are keen to engage with sigillographic material. The follow-on funding will enable the team to foster interdisciplinary dialogue and offer the benefit of our experience working with this material in terms of technological and methodological solutions to the challenge of making sigillographic information available to the widest variety of users. In so doing, it is an aspiration of the project team that, just as with the original project which is identified as a model in sigillographic studies, the proposed project will offer a novel and important instance of the ways in which high-quality archival research and associated outputs can be employed in exciting and constructive ways in the wider community.