Awarded Heritage Centre small grants - 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Forces Heritage Trust (CFHT) seeks funding assistance to professionally catalogue and digitise our extensive archive of unpublished World War I and II photographs, diaries, vessel blueprints, reports, oral histories and other artefacts, ensuring full public access.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.