What is it about?
The Human Remains Digital Library (HRDL) contains over 3,000 historic accounts and archaeological evidence of reburial and exhumation from British churches since the 7th century covering 13 centuries and multiple languages, all translated into modern British English. This article outlines how this digital library was built, how the library entries were sourced, cleaned, and standardised for the library, and the rationale behind how and why it was designed for non-specialist users.
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Why is it important?
Most digital libraries currently produced by academic projects are focussed on specific (handwritten) manuscripts from particular genres or authors and use existing software to build them, as they are essentially collections of PDFs. However, HRDL is a large thematic collection of typed material in Plain Text format and needed to be built from scratch. Unlike many academic digital libraries, HRDL was also built for a non-academic audience to use.
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This page is a summary of: Building The Human Remains Digital Library (HRDL), Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, May 2026, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3813803.
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