January 2025
University of Coimbra: Tangible VR Book: Immersive Exploration of Lloyd’s Register Ship Plans
This project aims to create a Tangible VR Book that brings the Lloyd’s Register of Ships collection to life for high-school classrooms. Using smartphone-based VR, the book will allow students to explore ship plans, survey reports, and historical maritime documents in an interactive, engaging format. Each page will incorporate visual markers that, when viewed through a VR headset, trigger 3D models and immersive content from Lloyd’s Register of Ships, making maritime history and engineering concepts accessible. Teachers will also receive a guide to creating their own versions, allowing for broader use in schools.
National University of Singapore: Register the Register
A pilot project to digitise the Lloyd's Register of Shipping prior to 1930 (with a possible extension from 1945) to produce datasets in machine-readable formats (e.g., .csv, .dta, .rdta). suitable for use by researchers and general public alike.
The aim of the project is to understand changes in maritime architecture and engine design which were developed to address the specific challenges of operating steamships in the Indian and Pacific Oceans after the opening of the Suez in 1869. By producing granular data contained in the Register, it would then allow changes to be tracked and relate them to the relative availability and co-location of two critical resources: fresh water and Welsh coal.
Museo Histórico de La Boca: Boca Port Buenos Aires: Lessons from shipwrecks, fires, and floods.
The Project looks to organize a historical database on shipwrecks, fires on board/land, and floods in the port of La Boca, Buenos Aires. Since the beginning of the city, the urban port is part of the history of transportation, commerce, arrival of migrants and residence for workers and businessmen. Based upon port studies, maritime, estuarine and river archaeology, and historical data, the project will produce surveys of institutional government and community archives, build up and publish a data base of hazards with available details upon ID/IMO/urban/date/location/cause/reactions, to address adaptations to cultural climate change.
Coastal Forces Heritage Trust: Digitisation of Coastal Forces Heritage Trust Archive
The Coastal Forces Heritage Trust (CFHT) seeks funding assistance to professionally catalogue and digitise our extensive archive of unpublished World War I and II photographs, diaries, vessel blueprints, reports, oral histories and other artefacts, ensuring full public access. Digitisation will add significantly to the publicly available body of evidence and insight affecting the safe and effective conduct of maritime operations in that period, the technology and often innovative engineering solutions that were required to keep our sailors alive, and also deliver an outstanding opportunity to advance public education of maritime transport, engineering and seafaring technology in that era.
Nautical Archaeology Society: Gathering information for citizen science monitoring of polluting wrecks
This data gathering project will create a framework for a potentially polluting wrecks (PPW) citizen science monitoring scheme to make both the environment and water-users safer. Marine environment user groups will be visited to raise awareness of PPWs to them, and the environment. These advocacy visits will establish the current knowledge of PPWs amongst the maritime community and to assess their capacity to safely and effectively collect data. In parallel, relevant government partners will be consulted to ensure that data capture is appropriate for their management of PPWs. This scheme could be disseminated globally through NAS’s international training partners.
The Maritime Archaeology Trust: Survey of Maritime and Underwater Cultural Heritage below the waves
The Survey of Maritime and Underwater Cultural Heritage (SoMUCH) project will gather and collate data for cross disciplinary research on ocean health monitoring, coastal erosion and dissemination, into an open-source database. A common methodology will be developed, examining the results of past, current and future projects by global NGOs. This will maximise the value of UCH to indicate risks while identifying and mitigating gaps in knowledge. This grant will enable the development phase, enhancing the network and building a detailed project delivery plan.
August 2024
The Common Room: Northern Coal Shipments, Navigating Global Impact in a Warming World
The Common Room is an archive, charity and heritage venue holding one of the largest public collections of archival material relating to the development of the coal-trade and its allied industries, including shipping. For coal mining to be profitable, the product had to be transported. Shipping coal was key to fuelling industrial expansion from the Northern Coalfields across the country in the 18th century.
The grant will cover volunteer research within our collection to inform a digital exhibition about the exportation of coal and new shipping technologies from the Northeast across the globe. Interpretation will centre around sustainability and assessing the long-term climate impacts.
National Life Stories: Exploring Innovations in Maritime Safety
National Life Stories [NLS] seeks to explore innovations in maritime safety through in-depth personal testimony. Using two long life story recordings, the grant will examine developments in the design and engineering of vessels and ports and the formulation of health and safety policy. The interviews will record specific changes, new technologies and approaches to risk management, documenting how institutional and policy change is instigated, introduced and evaluated. Interviews will be archived at the British Library in perpetuity and made available for research.
West Sussex County Council: Cataloguing the Marine and General Mutual Life Assurance Society Archive
This project will see a qualified archivist to catalogue and repackage the Marine and General Mutual Life Assurance Society (MGM) Archive over eight weeks to make it accessible to researchers at West Sussex Record Office (WSRO). Founded in 1851, MGM provided life assurance to mariners. The collection consists of the company’s business records between 1852-2000s and includes material such as minutes, financial records, and policy registers.
Lancashire Archive & Local History, Lancashire County Council: Fleetwood’s Coastal Past
The grant will promote Fleetwood's maritime heritage from the Lancashire Archives & Local History (LA&LH) collections through digitisation, public display at Fleetwood Library and digital records made available through our website Red Rose Collections and through our listening post at Lancashire Archives & Local History for researchers to consult.
Gloucestershire Archives: Gloucestershire Mariners
Gloucester developed as a seaport from 1827 when the ship canal opened to its new docks. Building on the historic trade of the River Severn an industry grew up, building, repairing, owning and crewing vessels in the ‘Home Trade’. South of Gloucester villages saw half their employment in maritime businesses.
This grant will study the industry, and the families involved to give an outline of Gloucestershire’s involvement in the national maritime industry. It will use national and local archives and research from dedicated family historians.
National Historic Ships UK: Don’t Rock the Boat, Stability Guidance for Static Floating Heritage
This grant researched, developed and published accessible guidance material for the owners of static floating historic vessels, contractors and service providers to the industry. Previous work and stakeholder engagement had identified a lack of guidelines and stability criteria for static vessels and similar floating structures which are open to the public. This issue is a key concern for historic vessels when they cease seagoing activity but remain afloat, with the need to create a safe environment for their users and retain significance.
The guidance material is now available on the National Historic Ships UK website: Stability Guidance for Floating Static Vessels. For additional information about the project see this webpage.
The University of Portsmouth: Re-IMAGEnging Port Cities, Diversifying Portsmouth Maritime History by Co-designing Interactions
Port cities' heritage portrays a problematic vision of colonial past that implicitly alienates communities who are underrepresented within maritime collections. This grant will co-design an interactive storytelling intervention using Portsmouth City Council Museum’s collection to facilitate the discovery of hidden histories and reflect on communal diversity, past, present and future.
The project will evaluate audience engagement and the educational opportunities of creative technologies to facilitate discourses around diversifying maritime heritage. This approach advocates for a proactive democratisation and reinterpretation of collections, challenging misrepresentation, thus creating social impact and engaging diverse audiences at the heart of communities.
Maritime Archaeology Sea Trust: Royal Navy Loss List, Interlinking with NMRN and MoD Salmo
The grant will link the following three databases:
- The Royal Navy Loss List (RNLL) is a fully searchable research tool that covers all Royal Navy vessels recorded as sunk or destroyed from 1343 to 2011.
- The National Museum of the Royal Navy (NMRN) Finds Catalogue. This comprises its entire collection, detailing the artefacts and documents in its possession.
- MoD Salmo database of Legacy Merchant Ships employed by MoD at the time of sinking (many are PPWs).
Highland Archive Service, High Life Highland: Following the Fish, Stories of the Herring Girls
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries hundreds of women left the Western Isles to travel north to Caithness then down the Scottish coast into England following the herring fleets. ‘Following the Fish’ seeks to research and tell the story of these women, their backbreaking work, and their vital importance to our national maritime history. Both individual stories and general context will be researched through collections held by the Highland Archive Service, Suffolk Archives, Norfolk Archives and Tasglann nan Eilean, resulting in the creation of an online exhibition, two sets of touring banners and two launch events (in Scotland and England).
SS Great Britain: Assembling the Great Western
Between 2024-29 the SS Great Britain Trust (SSGBT) is engaged in an ambitious project to recreate the earlier sister vessel of the Great Britain, the Great Western, in one half of Bristol’s last working drydock. The Great Western was the first purpose-built ocean-going steam vessel, and its successful launch and career marked a turning point in maritime history.
A significant initial phase for the SSGBT in this engineering project is to initiate significant collections activity that will allow the museum to curate, explore, and publicly engage with the fascinating stories of the people of the Great Western
Maritime Archaeological Society of Finland: Identifying Potential Shipwrecks on the Gulf of Finland.
Maritime Archaeological Society of Finland (MAS) is executing a long-term shipwreck surveying program "Baltic 3D Wreck Ontology", which aims at surveying all historic shipwrecks in the Baltic Sea and producing a virtual 3D-model and a scientific dating of the shipwrecks. This program has been active since 2018 and has already produced more than 150 surveyed sites and 3D-models/datings thereto.
This grant will enable an additional 10-15 wreck sites to be surveyed, 3D-modeled, radiocarbon dated and reported to the Finnish Heritage Agency.
Swansea University: A Voyage of Discovery on the Avon Searider
For the UK to nurture new manufacturing industries that triumph in a globalised economy, lessons must be learned from companies that have achieved that, companies like Avon Inflatables, who engineered a safer world. Avon become synonymous with the best that inflatable boating could offer and launched the world's first commercial RIB, the Searider, in 1969. Designed as a rescue vessel, their pedigree and heritage is legendary, but how they came to dominate their market remains unexamined. Employing a case-study approach, the grant will enable qualitative interviews and documentary film to investigate the people, processes, technology, and timings to understand the Searider's success.
Upcoming Small Grant Rounds:
- Monday 24th February 2025 - Monday 19th May 2025
- Monday 1st September 2025 - Monday 24th November 2025
Find out more information here.