“To unpath’d waters, undream’d shores”: 5 key transformations in UK marine collections connectivity

Unpath’d Waters has been delivered by a large consortium of diverse research organisations bringing a wide range of capabilities together. It has shown how connecting marine collections together across the UK has the demonstrable potential to invite new audiences to access and understand their maritime past, to enhance marine heritage management across state boundaries, and to open up innovative interdisciplinary research avenues. This presentation introduces five key impacts of the project: integrating the marine heritage inventories of all four UK home nations and the Isle of Man; enhancing public understanding of the significance of wrecks on the seabed; identifying lost wrecks and developing risk models for their future management; creating the most comprehensive models yet of the drowned prehistoric landscapes under the North Sea; and co-creation of immersive access to marine collections for visually impaired people.