Building The Human Remains Digital Library (HRDL)

The Human Remains Digital Library (HRDL), funded by a seven-year UKRI Future Leader’s Fellowship, is the first cross‑disciplinary, multilingual 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 seventh‑ to nineteenth‑century written accounts (whether real, embellished, or imagined) with standardized 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 multilingual textual excerpts and standardized 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 multilingual search; bespoke re‑OCR and cleaning pipelines; cross‑period spelling normalization; 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, multilingual, cross‑evidential digital libraries aimed at both academic analysis and applied knowledge exchange.