ARUNA BHAUGEERUTTY

Head of Digital Collections

Head of Digital Collections at the Ashmolean, and Strategic Lead in this area for all the museums in the GLAM Division at the University of Oxford

Contact
Email: aruna.bhaugeerutty@ashmus.ox.ac.uk
ORCID: 0000-0002-6078-851X

Biography

Dr Aruna Bhaugeerutty is Head of Digital Collections at the Ashmolean, and Strategic Lead in this area for all the museums within the GLAM Division at the University of Oxford. Here she oversees museum digital collection systems infrastructure and services as well as the digitisation and publication of museum collections online.

Aruna is also currently a Director of the national Museums Data Service, Co-Chair of the national Collections Digitisation Network, and Deputy Chair of Collections Trust. As a consultant, Aruna provides specialist advice to a range of cultural institutions, which have previously included Wellcome Collection, ART UK, and Spencer Museum of Art.

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Aruna’s research interests are currently focused on enabling access to cultural heritage collections for scholarship and engagement through information policy and technology.

More recent projects have focused on the interoperability of data and images, the decolonisation of cultural data, approaches to rights and risk management, and potential of artificial intelligence and machine learning for data creation, digitisation, and collections discovery.

Aruna has previously collaborated with other research teams from the Department of Engineering Science such as the Oxford e-Research Centre and Computer Vision Group as well as developed research partnerships with Edinburgh, Liverpool and Yale Universities.

Aruna is a placement supervisor and career mentor for students on the MSc in Digital Scholarship (Humanities Division) focused on the application of digital tools and methods to humanistic scholarship and associated challenges. This research programme pairs students with renowned digital scholars with whom they can discuss and seek advice on their own careers as well as within live digital projects to allow students to gain practical experience while developing their research area.

Aruna gives lectures and workshops at the annual Digital Humanities @ Oxford Summer School (DHOxSS), a world-leading, not-for-profit training programme offering a range of courses on digital humanities tools, techniques and research methods led by experts who are innovating in the digital humanities.

Aruna is happy to offer lectures on subjects related to digital heritage and humanities and the management of cultural heritage information for research and engagement.

Aruna is interested in supervising doctoral research (DPhil) focused on museum digital collections related to her expertise areas.

Aruna is a mentor, supervisor and examiner for master’s students (MSc) specialising in museum digital collections, information management and associated methods, tools and technologies.

Assistant Investigator

  • 2023  'Enriching Exhibition Stories: : Adding Voices to Quire'
    Organization: Engineering Science
    Funder: Arts and Humanities Research Council
    Total value of award: £802
     
  • 2022  'UK-US AHRC-NEH Enriching Exhibition Scholarship: Reconciling Knowledge Graphs and Social Media from Newspaper Articles to Twitters'
    Organization: Engineering Science
    Funder: Arts and Humanities Research Council
    Total value of award: £23,553

Archival, Repository and Related Studies; Art History; Communication Technology and Digital Media Studies; Cultural Studies; Database Management; Information and Computing Sciences; Information Systems Management; Interorganisational Information Systems and Web Services; Musicology and Ethnomusicology; Records and Information Management (excl. Business Records and Information Management)