Building the Human Remains Digital Library (HRDL)—The Editorial Steps behind Sourcing, Cleaning and Aligning a Cross-Discipline Multi-Lingual Thematic Resource

Nugent, R ORCID: 0000-0001-6323-9527, Butler, JO ORCID: 0000-0002-5523-992X, Cahilly-Bretzin, G ORCID: 0009-0008-6510-1941, Daubney, A ORCID: 0000-0002-6325-6287, Farrow, T ORCID: 0000-0002-0188-7227, Foster, K ORCID: 0009-0003-5307-2753, Gribomont, I ORCID: 0000-0001-7443-5849 and Hopwood, L ORCID: 0000-0002-1584-6047 (2026) Building the Human Remains Digital Library (HRDL)—The Editorial Steps behind Sourcing, Cleaning and Aligning a Cross-Discipline Multi-Lingual Thematic Resource Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, 19 (2). pp. 1-19. ISSN 1556-4673, 1556-4711

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Abstract

The Human Remains Digital Library (HRDL), funded by a seven-year UKRI Future Leader’s Fellowship, is the first cross-disciplinary, multi-lingual thematic resource created to support researchers, heritage professionals and decision makers managing historic human remains encountered in British churches and cathedrals. It integrates for the first time curated excerpts from 7th- to 19th-century written accounts (whether real, embellished or imagined) with standardised summaries of modern archaeological evidence for historic exhumations, innovating both temporal–spatial analysis of burial (re-)locations and investigation of evolving ethical, emotional and theological notions of ‘respect’ for the dead. HRDL departs from manuscript-centric libraries by integrating multi-lingual textual excerpts and standardised archaeological summaries within a single thematic, cross-period corpus, enabling site- and genre-specific retrieval and analysis, advancing digital library practice through a combined workflow: discovery via concordance- and regex-driven multi-lingual search, bespoke re-OCR and cleaning pipelines, cross-period spelling normalisation, controlled vocabularies bridging historical text and archaeological terminologies and a CIDOC-CRM–aligned metadata ontology served through a user-centric Blazor interface. The resulting corpus (3,294 records at launch of over a million words, across multiple sub-corpora and languages, with new translations for previously inaccessible medieval sources) provides site-specific and period-specific evidence to support church building maintenance and (re-)burial policy while opening large-scale research questions previously impossible to address. This article outlines the editorial and technical rationale behind HRDL’s design and contributes a reproducible blueprint for building thematic, multi-lingual, cross-evidential digital libraries aimed at both academic analysis and applied knowledge exchange.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	43 History, Heritage and Archaeology, 4301 Archaeology, 4302 Heritage, Archive and Museum Studies, 4303 Historical Studies, 46 Information and Computing Sciences, 4610 Library and Information Studies
Divisions:	Faculty of Health & Life Sciences Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences > School of Histories, Languages and Cultures Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences > School of Histories, Languages and Cultures > Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology Faculty of Health & Life Sciences > Inst. Population Health Faculty of Health & Life Sciences > Inst. Population Health > IPH Professional Services
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	19 May 2026 08:39
Last Modified:	20 Jul 2026 01:57
DOI:	10.1145/3813803
Related Websites:	Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3198546
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