Historic Environment Scotland submission for AHRC Capability for Collections Fund (CapCo) stream B - equipment

These equipment upgrades will improve and enhance Historic Environment Scotland's (HES) core functions in investigating, caring for and promoting Scotland's historic environment, both in terms of managing our in-house collections and also underpinning our wider engagement and support across the sector. Our historic environment is a sophisticated assemblage of historic buildings and structures, archaeological sites, monuments and landscapes which, together with object collections and archives, make up a unique and interconnected resource, collectively documenting over 5000-years of human history.

Through upgrades to key pieces of equipment - spanning across material science, 3D digital documentation and visualisation, remote survey and applied object conservation - our ability to apply science to culture to better understand and safeguard our national collections will be enhanced, increasing wider benefits through sharing of information and promoting additional collaborative research with a range of partners and stakeholders.

The targeted investment is particularly timely because climate change is resulting in unprecedented impacts on our historic environment, significantly increasing the threats to its preservation. Increased frequency and severity of extreme weather events and the acceleration of coastal erosion are threatening iconic sites, requiring better understanding of impacts and adaptive actions.

Tackling the causes of climate change also requires unprecedented levels of intervention to buildings to support emissions reduction and decarbonisation. To address these issues, HES recently launched a new and ambitious Climate Action Plan to set out our priorities for understanding and adapting to the challenges of climate change. Research and innovation is one of four cross-cutting priorities helping to support delivery of this plan.

By allowing us to create richer datasets and helping to make information more widely available in more accessible formats and in greater quantity, this investment will transform our use of digital resources to support ourselves and others to make better informed choices about how we look after our cultural heritage for future generations.

The investment will result in practical benefits to HES, our partners, and wider stakeholders. It will produce efficiencies and significant cost savings as well as the provision of new quality, multi-purpose data, which will support us and other asset managers to devise more effective interventions to maintain and adapt the historic environment to maximise benefits whilst retaining cultural value.

This increased capability will support new research and innovation and increase access and engagement, including reaching new audiences and development of resources for education and training. We will also support new economic opportunities by informing planning and development, and supporting resource efficiency and the sustainable re-use of historic assets through, for example, provision of improved information to support energy efficiency retrofit of existing buildings, currently a major strand of economic recovery programmes.

The upgraded equipment will also support research and skills development in heritage management and conservation. It will support the work and development of our in-house trainees, collaborative PhD students and junior researchers, and underpin national and international partnerships. This will help to ensure that the next generation of researchers and heritage professionals have the skills necessary to tackle contemporary challenges.

Through the investment and the enhanced capability it will deliver, we will build on our strong reputation for excellence and innovative cross-disciplinary partnership approaches to research, and increase our support for others by providing a national-scale resource for collaboration, education and training.