The British International Research Institutes (BIRI) are global research centres with a focus on arts, humanities, and social sciences. The BIRI cover diverse regions including the Mediterranean, the Middle East and North Africa, East Africa and South, Southwest and Central Asia. Their historically significant archival resources, created over more than a century, range from photographic, architectural and cartographic archives to archaeological collections and corporate records of research, undertaken by or under the auspices of an individual institute, and personal archives of scholars contributing data to one or more institutions. In 2022, the institutes started working collaboratively towards standards and methodologies to enable access to and facilitate querying and searching collectively in their resources. This effort mainly focus on the use of Linked Open Data for identifying the links between collections, that usually remain hidden and underused and for building stories on top of them for two main purposes: (a) for public engagement, to tell meaningful and engaging stories using connected pieces of information, to a larger and more diverse audience and (b) for academic research, to present examples of research questions that can be better investigated when cross-collection searches are made possible. This paper discusses the first steps of the methodology adopted, the challenges as well as the first outcomes of this process, already promising.