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museumi n n o v a t i o n . c r e a t i v i t y . i n t e l l i g e n c e . c o m m u n i t y .

iDmuseum

www.museum-id.com

museums and the political landscape national trust’s interpretation experiment

how museums are using social mediaglasgow’s new open storage facility

Are Museums About Stories or Objects?

M U S E U M S | G A L L E R I E S | H E R I TA G E | AT T R A C T I O N S

plus: acropolis museum opens, pitt rivers stunning redevelopment, wedgwood museum wins art fund prize, collective museum marketing,

interactives at great north museum, terror háza museum reviewed.

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04 EDITORIALOn debate and discussion...06 NEWS AND VIEWSRound-up of the latest news andviews from the museum world...08 2009 ART FUND PRIZEThe Wedgwood Museum in Stoke-on-Trent wins £100,000 prize...09 ACROPOLIS NOWControversy as new €130m museum opens in Athens...10 MUSEUM OF THE FUTUREDetails of the Science Museum’s £100m masterplan...12 AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENTThe success of The Lightbox is down to community engagement...16 PITT RIVERS RE-OPENSOxford favourite re-opens after handsome redevelopment...18 MUSEUM CONNECTIONSMuseums in literature - our suggestions for great summer reads20 TERROR HAZA MUSEUMSReview of the Budapest museum that remembers tyranny...22 SEMINARS & STUDY DAYSCalender of events: branding,exhibition design, education...

BOXED.c cel fotografie Brugge

TM

by meyvaert

MEYVAERT DOK NOORD 3 B-9000 GENT BELGIUM www.meyvaert.be info@meyvaert.be t +32 9 225 54 27

www.kareldestoute.be

Contents issue 2

24 STORIES OR OBJECTS?See what’s being said and add your voice to the debate.... 30 MUSEUMS & POLITICSOr why museums need to stop being neutral spaces...39 THE NT EXPERIMENTThe new ‘Atmospheres’ interpreta-tion project begins...44 OPEN STORAGE ACCESSAnd how it might prove an alternative future for museums...50 I LIKE MUSEUMSMarketing; What happens when 71 museums work together...54 SOCIAL MEDIA & MUSEUMSWhat happens when the National Media Museum uses Flickr...58 GREAT NORTH MUSEUMWe take a look inside the new £26m flagship attraction...70 RETROSPECTIVE: OPERAThe portfolio of the Amsterdam based designers...82 FAMILY FAVOURITEOxford University Museum of Natural History...

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Museum Identity132 London RoadStony StratfordMK11 1JHENGLAND

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Publisher | EditorGregory Chamberlain

DirectorEmma Dawes

Design & Productionnewera media

Cover image: Nikos Daniilidis Acropolis Museum

© Museum Identity Ltd 2009. All rights reserved.

Printed in England | ISSN 2040-736XMuseum-iD magazine is FREE

Museum-iD is an independent thinktank for museums and heritage professionals. Through an ongoing series of seminars, study days and publications we work with the museum community to discover and share the very best new ideas. We are ambitious for what museums can achieve and want to help build stronger and more dynamic organisations that meet the challenges of the twenty-first century.

EditorialThe role museums play in society is again centre stage. With tighter funding a real possibility it’s now vital to advocate why museums are important and emphasise how much they have changed. Neil MacGregor and Nicholas Serota were doing just that in their discussion at the London School of Economics. Both forcibly making the point that museums in the UK have a very different place in civic society than their counterparts in the US & Europe. And why this different relationship with the public means that UK museums are the most exciting in the world, both for audiences and the people working in them. But how far museums are willing to go with their relationship with the public is the real question. That’s what was up for discusion at our recent seminar: ‘Radical Museums: Democracy, Dialogue & Debate’. Richard Benjamin’s keynote ‘Museums of the people, by the people, for the people: myth or reality?’ was a catalyst for debate. The arguments continued throughout the day and there was real disagreement about whether or not museums should be neutral spaces and if they want to be democratic in any meaningful way. The debates will continue and we intend to be at the centre of that discussion. And with that in mind, please do get in touch with your ideas for the future.

Gregory Chamberlain - greg@museum-id.com

Welcome to the second issue of Museum-iD magazine. Thanks for your feedback and messages of support. Please keep in touch and keep telling us what you think...

Museum identity

Museum-iD Bookmarks: Keep up-to-date daily with the latest news and views about the museum world at http://delicious.com/MuseumID

We love museums. Do museums love us back? If you haven’t seen this cartoon yet you have to check it out. It’s by the creators of The Pinky Show which ‘presents marginalized perspectives as a means of challenging individuals to consider realities that lie beyond their own lived experiences’. The Pinky Show ‘believe that positive social change becomes real when human beings learn how to critically engage ‘the Other’ with openness, honesty, and compassion’. Sounds interesting, right? Here Kim the cat discusses what museums are in her report: “The Creation of Value: meditations on the logic of museums and other coercive institutions”. Made us chuckle anyway. Take a look. [http://www.pinkyshow.org]

Free entry to museums to be scraped? “I make this prediction: if, heaven forbid, there were to be a Conservative government, which I don’t think there will be, they will scrap it. They are not being open about their policy.” Ben Bradshaw, the new culture secretary, warns the museums sector of what may be on the way. [The Times]

Museums’ future lies on the internet “Two titans of the British museum world, Sir Nicholas Serota and Neil MacGregor, last night sketched out their visions for the museum of the future. Both said that the relationship between institutions and their audiences would be transformed by the internet. Museums, they said, would become more like multimedia organisations.” [The Times]

An unfortunate truth for museumsNick Poole gives it to you straight: “Collections Management has always been about the active management of a careful equilibrium between preservation, use and cost. Tweaking one variable has a profound effect on the others. The reality for museums is that the demand for their services has increased, and their operating budgets are in decline. This can only result in a gradual diminution first of Collections Care and ultimately of collecting itself. The unfortunate truth, then, is that the cultural community may need to adjust its view of what constitutes the responsible long-term management of the collections in our care.” [Collections Trust]

Why going to MoMa is an intimate experience“Have you’ve ever looked at a piece of artwork in a museum and found that it relates to your own life? That’s what director Azazel Jacobs seeks to encapsulate in his 90-second movie I See, which is the first film commissioned by the MoMa in a new annual initiative to promote the work of rising filmmakers.” [Vanity Fair}

The wrong words in museumsTom Morton, curator at The Hayward Gallery on interpretation text: “When wall texts in museums and galleries are meant to elucidate and educate, why are most of them badly written, full of jargon, and painfully reductive?” [Frieze magazine]

Demand for arts to have special treatmentWriting in The Times Richard Morrison gets all

angry and outraged with the arts establishment: “Even the title of their latest missive puts my teeth on edge. It’s called Get It: The Power of Cultural Learning. But why should we “get it”? To keep arts people in subsidies and jobs? Who would support that? Obviously the people who published the report. [The Times]

An old pot is just an old pot Charlie Brooker, leading culture vulture: “...art galleries and museums...they’re full of secretly bored people pulling falsely contemplative faces. It’s a weird mass public mime.” [guardian.co.uk]

Schools and Museums - making them pay“Museums and galleries must see education as part of their core tasks and accept that this needs to be financed from their own resources in the same way as other things they do. Yet if this is a key part of a child’s education, shouldn’t schools feel that it has a call on their resources as well? We’re rightly protective of free access to museums and galleries and the free service offered to schools, but if we want to move beyond the termly visit to the local museum we are going to have to be more innovative.” [The Guardian]

Museum authority and the developing debateHere’s a blog well worth reading (not something you say everyday) - it’s by Robin Boast, Deputy Director of the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Robin has quite a bit to say and I’d certainly recomend a look. For example, this is him on museum authority: “...the common problem with museums - and we could include archives and libraries here too - [is] that they see any form of open access to collections information as a direct threat to their authority. It also, in a very enjoyable way, makes the point that none of the arguments for this are in any way true. I would go much further, as I have done for over 20 years, that the basic premise is completely wrong. Museums, and museum professionals, only have authority to the degree that they continue to control access to, and the public accounts of, their collections. [http://rescite.blogspot.com]

The impact of the recession on the artsThe Art Fund & Arts Council talk about the impact of the recession on the arts on Front Row on Radio 4. John Wilson talks to David Barrie, Director of

the Art Fund (which has surveyed museums to chart the impact of the recession), to Chair of the Arts Council Liz Forgan, and to Chief Executive of Arts and Business Colin Tweedy about whether businesses are turning their back on funding and partnering arts organisations [Radio 4].

Restoration keeps the Pitt Rivers’ charmWaldemar Janusczcak seems pretty happy that the restoration of the Pitt Rivers hasn’t resulted in the place being, as we all seem to like saying nowadays, transformed. Here he is writing in The Sunday Times: “The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford has had such a huge impact on the national imagination that the news it was being restored, updated and reorganised filled me with horror. Oh, no. What are they going to do to it? If any museum in Britain needed to remain entirely untouched by the destructive hand of progress, it was surely the Pitt Rivers” [The Sunday Times].

Museum studies star peformer “Leicester University has been enjoying a period of unprecedented success, after many years living in the shadow of the big city universities. The star performer was the small department of museum studies, which produced the highest proportion of ‘world-leading’ research in any subject at any UK university, with almost two-thirds of its work placed in that top category”. [The Times]

A museum of trees that speak of history “The notion that the Grand Concourse could be turned into a long boulevard of talking trees — a tree museum, with trees connecting to oral guides of Bronx history — came to Katie Holten one day when she was traipsing along the boulevard near the Cross Bronx Expressway”. [New York Times]

Hermitage’s satellite museum in AmsterdamAmsterdam is famous for its outstanding galleries. However, the Rijksmuseum has been under reconstruction since 2003 and the Stedelijk since 2004. But the Hermitage’s new satellite museum should encourage visitors to spend an extra day in the Dutch capital. [Economist.com]

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News and views

Read these articles in full and keep up-to-date daily with the latest news and views

from the museums and heritage sector with Museum-ID bookmarks:

http://delicious.com/MuseumID

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The new Acropolis Museum officially opened on Saturday June 20. The €130 million project, co-financed by the Hellenic Republic and the European Regional Development Fund, has over 14,000 sqaure meters of exhibition space and offers 360-degree panoramic views of the Acropolis and Athens. The opening of the new museum has also predictably reignited the long-running and acrimonious debate about the rightful home of the Parthenon sculptures. Christopher Hitchens, in his usual belligerent and beguiling form, leads the charge for the return of the marbles in a Vanity Fair magazine article, while Richard Dorment, writing in the Telegraph, goes over the case for keeping them at the British Museum. Countless others have also expressed their opinions and we’ve bookmarked some of them at http://delicious.com/MuseumID. The Trustees of the British Museum provide a comprehensive and robust account of their position on the BM website: http://www.britishmuseum.org/

The argument will of course continue to rage but this shouldn’t get in the way of the appreciation of what is an exceptionally elegant new museum. Standing just 300 meters southeast of the Parthenon, the constraints of the site have been turned into an architectural opportunity offering a simple and precise museum with the mathematical and conceptual clarity associated with ancient Greece. The visitor’s route through the museum forms a clear loop through a building divided into a base, middle and top. The base of the museum floats over existing archaeological excavations with a network of columns placed so as not to disturb the sensitive site. The orientation then gently rotates as it rises so that the main galleries in the middle form a double-height trapezoidal plate. The top, which is made up of the rectangular Parthenon Gallery arranged around an indoor court, rotates gently again to orient the Marbles exactly as they were placed at the Parthenon centuries ago.

Acropolis Now€130m Museum Opens

The Wedgwood Museum in Stoke-on-Trent won the £100,000 Art Fund Prize for museums and galleries. The judges, who included artist Grayson Perry and mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, praised the way it uses its internationally-renowned collection to take visitors on a 250-year tour of British social, design and industrial history, while remaining firmly embedded in the local community. David Puttnam, Chair of the judges, commented: “This Museum is extraordinary... [it] brilliantly highlights the marriage of art, design, manufacturing and commerce; a marriage that resonates more today than at possibly any time in the intervening years. In every respect it fully meets our criteria of what a 21st century museum should aspire to be.” Andrew Macdonald, Acting Director of The Art Fund, said: “The Wedgwood Museum celebrates the extraordinary achievement of Britain’s industrial history. It is a richly deserving

winner...and its victory could not have come at a better time for the area, after all the uncertainty there has been over the future of the factory which still operates alongside the museum.” This year the public was also a judge in the first People’s Choice poll. Over 27,000 people voted on guardian.co.uk also choosing The Wedgwood Museum as their clear winner. Owned and run by an independent charitable trust, the new £10 million museum is housed on the historic manufacturing site of Josiah Wedgwood and Sons, and tells the story of one of the world’s most recognisable consumer brands. Visitors to the museum not only see ceramics but also a range of manuscripts, documentation, factory equipment, original models and fine art related to this world-renowned ceramics company. The three other museums shortlisted were Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, for its Centre of New Enlightenment; Orleans House Gallery in Twickenham and the Ruthin Craft Centre in North Wales.

Art Fund Prize Wedgwood Museum Wins

Nikos Daniilidis / Acropolis Museum

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The Science Museum has announced a new £100 million master plan. Museum of the Future, as the vision has been called, was unveiled to conincide with the launch of the Science Museum’s 100th birthday celebrations. Expected to be completed in 2015, Museum of the Future is a bold architectural vision for the Science Museum that includes an exciting new glass and light facade, multiple entrances and a range of new and updated galleries. At a time when Exhibition Road is re-launched as a global, cultural destination, The Beacon will dramatically transform the facade of the museum with the intention of communicating to visitors that the Science Museum is a dynamic and engaging place to visit, bursting with energy and ideas. At street level the new facade will be designed to be open and inviting with multiple entrances to improve access. New media walls will be employed to provide additional colour and movement and will display visitor messages to attract, intrigue and draw people in. Once inside, the visitor will then be able to control their unique Science Museum experience. A new Orientation Space will use dynamic signage,

interactive maps, new accessible information points and the latest mobile technologies to ensure that the visitor can tailor their trip to meet their individual needs and interests. Some of the key elements of Museum of the Future masterplan will be: • The Beacon: a new structure of glass and light on the facade of the Science Museum that will be visible along the relaunched Exhibition Road. • Facade: multiple entrances will improve access to the Science Museum while media walls will attract and draw people in. • SkySpace: a stunning, cavernous rooftop space that will create a stage on which some of the most important exhibits will be brought to life through innovative interpretation. SkySpace will showcase the theme of cosmology and contain a new destination cafe with dramatic views into the Museum. • New galleries: Complementing the established Flight and Making the Modern World galleries, two new permanent galleries will be added to showcase some of the most important objects in the very heart of the Museum - Making Modern Communication and Making Modern Science.

Museum of the Future Science Museum’s Masterplan

newangleInteractive exhibits, AV environments,film production, web and animation

The British MuseumHistoric Royal PalacesRoyal Observatory, GreenwichNational Waterfront Museum, Swansea

102 Harmood Street, London, NW1 8DS020 7916 0106 www.newangle.co.uk

Clients include:

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If ever there is a fairy tale written about a museum project then it will surely be based on the story of The Lightbox in Woking. The Lightbox is a new gallery and museum which opened in Woking, Surrey in September of 2007. The Lightbox is based in a stunning architect designed building close to the town centre. The architects Marks Barfield have created a spacious, light filled series of galleries which house both a permanent display on the history of the Surrey town and temporary exhibition spaces. The Lightbox story is that of a very long journey involving triumph, disappointment, lots of luck and many setbacks. In the best tradition of fairy tales it is truly a rags to riches story. The Lightbox was founded as a charity 14 years ago by 70 local people who wanted to create an arts and heritage space for the town. They had a very simple passion which was to show that a town which had a quite serious image problem really did have a fascinating history and indeed was home to many people who were enthusiastic about and engaged in the visual arts. As with many volunteer projects raising awareness and more importantly raising money was a very slow process. They began in a very small way with a charity shop in the town centre and local fund raising events. The aim was quite modest to begin with and centred around trying to find a town centre space- perhaps a disused shop or small office building which could be converted to a museum and gallery. This kind of organisation exists very successfully all over the U.K. But timing was really against the charity as Woking was proving to be very active in attracting large businesses to relocate from London to this leafy Surrey location. Every available building was quickly snapped up and the charity with very limited resources could not compete. In total 15 different sites were looked at, each and every one had major problems. It is remarkable that the volunteer group never gave

up their search. Of course along the way their numbers had been strengthened along with their resolve to make the project happen. In 1997 Woking Borough Council began an investment in the organisation which was to prove a turning point. They appointed a Project Director to try and move things forward and funded an Education and Outreach officer to strengthen the already substantial links with the local community. The Lightbox is a project that has grown out of the community rather than being imposed on it and people enthusiastically took up opportunities to work with artists and to create heritage projects initiated by the small Lightbox team. One of the first Education projects ‘Schools Adopt Monuments’ won a national award and the education work became an integral part of the Lightbox offering as it remains today. The organisation became so successful in engaging the local community that some wondered if there really was a need for a building but the determination to create something permanent which could engage so many more people was very strong. The Lightbox had been very successful in demonstrating to the local authority the value of culture in forging strong and sustainable communities. The Lightbox development co- incided with a big influx of population into the town. Many new high rise apartments were emerging in the town which attracted young professionals from London and has been previously mentioned many new businesses were relocating. This resulted in a whole new group of people in the town with no idea of its history or culture. The Lightbox was engaging with these new communities and the potential to assist in the community strategy became obvious. This led in 2001 to the local authority gifting a town centre site and £3m capital development funding, suddenly the very small aspirations for a local gallery had transformed into an ambitious new build project.

Audience Development. Marilyn Scott on how to engage the community to become an award-winning gallery

The Lightbox: engaging the community

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Woking was not a town known for striking architecture or indeed for Surrey Heritage buildings. The Lightbox decided, for this very reason that they wanted to think big and launched an international architectural competition to find architects to create the building of their dreams. Marks Barfield were the architects selected from over 70 submissions and they started to work with the charity trustees to bring an exacting brief to reality. The ongoing need to engage with the community has been a defining principle for the organisation and at every stage of development the community has been involved. During the process of design numerous focus groups, discussion meetings, exhibitions were held to try and define what kind of building local residents wanted for their town and more importantly what should go on inside. Focus groups involved many different visitor groups, from teachers to older people, artists to local historians. Gradually the responses were sifted and turned into a brief. Marks Barfield continued this process of consultation at every stage of their design, making sure that the building was fit for purpose but inspirational in design. The people of the town became engaged in architecture and the effect it could have on their surroundings, for the first time, and it was both exciting and challenging for all involved. The design for The Lightbox building emerged and excited a great deal of comment- not all positive of course since architecture by its very nature is controversial but it certainly got people thinking. Building work began in 2005 and the charity was faced with raising £4m for the project to match the capital investment made by Woking Borough Council. Funding was raised from HLF, The Arts Council, trusts and foundations, national and local business and even more satisfying over £50,000 from local people through a scheme whereby names of donors were engraved on glass all around the building. This was modestly priced at £25 per name allowing everyone to have a small stake in the building which they had been promised for so long. The Lightbox building is a simple concept which revolves around two temporary exhibition galleries of varying size. The smaller gallery is ideally designed for photographic exhibitions, one man shows and craft exhibitions. The main gallery is 250 square metres, double height space and houses a wide range of varied art exhibitions. Also housed in the building is the museum of

the history of Woking, told in a contemporary way using oral history collected over the last 10 years as the main means of interpretation. The Lightbox aims to draw audiences from all over the South East with a varied and changing exhibition programme. The aim of the organization is to provide exhibitions of interest for both families and those with specialist interest in the visual and decorative arts. Education is at the heart of the building, housed in a light and airy Education studio. Here workshops take place every weekend, with curriculum based school visits during the week and also shared occupancy with the local sixth form college who deliver their AS and A2 level art and design programmes in the building. The opportunity to study art and design in a gallery setting has led to an increase in the popularity of the college and has been a great selling point to students. The Lightbox also runs two after school art clubs and runs Arts Award programmes for those registered on the over 14 club programme. The Lightbox is an independent charity and has to raise a significant part of its own running costs. It enjoys a great deal of visionary support from Woking Borough Council and has secured a 15 year service level agreement which funds approximately 45% of the core costs. The remaining funding is found through revenue generating activities such as the café and shop and corporate hire. There is a thriving corporate membership scheme, drawn from local businesses, once again emphasizing the strong links with the surrounding community. The Lightbox also enjoys support from the local community in a different way. Woking born business man Chris Ingram has generously loaned his collection of Modern British Art, both painting and sculpture, to The Lightbox. The collection has never been seen as a whole in public before, although individual pieces have toured both nationally and internationally. It is very rare for hidden collections of such high quality to emerge and the Lightbox are incredibly proud and excited about the chance to display works on a permanent basis. The collection has developed, first and foremost, from Chris Ingram’s fascination with the feel and mood of Modern British art. He is drawn to the different ways in which artists reflected the world around them throughout the first half of the 20th century. This important collection

gives visitors in the South East a new opportunity to access and assess the work of a fascinating group of Modern British artists. Household names such as Dame Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore feature in the collection with works emblematic of early trends in modern art. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s delicate forays into figuration are evidenced as well as a charming set of bronze female figures by Reg Butler executed throughout the 1950s. A series of artist groups are represented throughout the collection including the London Group, the St. Ives School and Unit One. A visit to The Lightbox now provides a snapshot of the collection with many sculptural pieces displayed throughout the building. Across from the main entrance, the imposing Riace Figure III by Elisabeth Frink stands as guardian of the ground floor. Frink found the combination of beauty and uneasiness in her inspiration - original fifth century BC Greek bronzes, strangely appealing. One of the first exhibitions shown at The Lightbox in January 2008 was ‘2D- 3D’ where some of the sculptural icons of modern British art from the Ingram collection were showcased. Rarely seen preparatory works on paper hung next to their sculptural equivalent showing the process that sculptors go through in developing their three dimensional creations. Further exhibitions using the Ingram collection are a regular feature of the programme including a major retrospective of the work of Dame Elisabeth Frink due in 2010 and groups of works are used as the basis for an education collection which is permanently

available for school groups to use throughout the year. Visitors will always find something new as the Lightbox is keen to differentiate from other modern British art exhibitions of recent years. Currently showing is a retrospective of the work of Steve Bell, Guardian cartoonist for the last thirty years. The exhibition charts Steve’s work through the Thatcher era, John Major and Tony Blair and several American presidents. In November 2008 we exhibited the work of Bob Dylan, the cultural icon who is also a very accomplished artist, prior to an extended European tour. Visitors were able to enjoy Dylan’s work, inspired by his time on the road touring. In January 2009 sculpture is again the focus of the exhibition programme as the work of Caro and Paolozzi is showcased using the Ingram Collection and private and Arts Council loans. The Lightbox has moved undoubtedly from very small beginnings with modest aspiration to winning the £100,000 Art Fund Prize in 2008. The glory of being named Museum of the Year is perhaps just reward for all those people who 15 years earlier had dreamed of a gallery and museum for the town. Nearly 100,000 people have enjoyed its glorious architecture and lively programmes in the first year since opening - the Business Plan predicted 50,000. It is truly an example of people power, how if a community gets behind a project and realizes its value then it can become a success.

Marilyn Scott - Director, The Lightbox

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Pitt Rivers

The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford re-opened to visitors on the 1st May after a second phase of redevelopment to improve its public and education facilities. The changes allow visitors to appreciate afresh the significance of this extraordinary collection. A major part of the project has been the dismantling of the 1960s exhibition gallery at the entrance to the Museum, restoring the original view through to the Museum’s spectacular totem pole on the far wall. Original display cases, displaced to the Lower Gallery in the 1960s, have been returned to their place at the front of the Museum. The area on the Lower Gallery vacated by these cases provides a new space where family activities can now take place. At the Museum’s entrance a platform has been constructed allowing visitors to enter on the same level as the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. This space now accommodates a new shop and reception area. From this point, a wide set of stairs leads down into the displays, with a platform lift to the side to make access easier for wheelchair users and pushchairs. The installation of an environmental control system beneath the entrance platform will help preserve the Museum’s collections and greatly improves the air quality for visitors. While the Museum’s historic displays and celebrated atmosphere have been carefully maintained, there are also eight additional displays, focusing on painting and decorative styles. They feature many previously unseen artefacts from the reserve collections exhibited in the Museum’s characteristic style. In the course of the project over 5000 objects have been removed, condition checked and returned to display. A new learning space has also been created. The Upper Gallery of the Museum is scheduled to reopen in Spring 2010. Funding for the project has come from the Heritage Lottery Fund, private benefactors and trusts such as the Clore Duffield Foundation and the DCMS/Wolfson Foundation’s Museum and Galleries Improvement Fund.

Pitt Rivers, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PP. Free entry seven days a week.

Re-opens after Redevelopment

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(data: DCMS)

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Museums in literature. Looking for a good summer read? Why not try one of these novels (of varying quality, popularity and style) with the word ‘museum’ in the title?

Museum connections

The British Museum is Falling Down The Museum of

Unconditional Surrender

Museum of Human Beings

Behind the Scenes at the Museum

The Museum of Innocence

Outside the Dog Museum

The Museum GuardMurder in the Museum

Museum Pieces

The British Museum is Falling Down is a comic novel by David Lodge about a student who, rather than work on his thesis in the reading room of the British Museum, gets into all kinds of trouble.The Museum of Innocence by Nobel-laureate Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk is the story, starting in 1975, of Kemal and his distant relative Füsun whom he loves. The Museum of Unconditional Surrender by Dubravka Ugrešic. The heroine of this novel is a middle-aged Croatian who reflects on exile, life in Berlin, and a romantic encounter in Lisbon.Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson chronicles the lives of four generations of women from Ruby Lennox’s great-grandmother Alice to her mother’s failed dreams.Outside the Dog Museum by Jonathan Carroll concerns Harry Radcliffe, who, with the aid of a

therapist, has recently recovered from a mental collapse and reexamines his constructs of reality.Museum Pieces by Elizabeth Ann Tallent tells to story of Clarissa and Peter Barnes and their daughter, Tara, who faces emotional crises becauses of her parents’ separation.The Museum Guard by Howard Norman is a troubling tale of love found and lost. Set in Nova Scotia before World War II the last few pages are set in Amsterdam just before it fell to the Nazis.Murder in the Museum by Simon Brett. An Elizabethan house is about to be turned into a museum. Then a sudden discovery is made. Buried in the kitchen garden is a human skeleton.Museum of Human Beings by Colin Sargent is a stylish look at the fate of Sacagawea’s baby son, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, the first Native American to tour Europe.

“Museums, museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeologists, crazy attempts to co-ordinate and get into a fixed order that which has no fixed order and will not be co-coordinated! It is sickening! Why must all experience be systematized? A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.”D.H. Lawrence (British Poet, Novelist and Essayist, 1885-1930)

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The slow, viscous drip-drop of oil fills the entrance lobby with an eerie, unsettling noise. A continuous flow obscures the faces of hundreds of victims of tyranny who were tortured and killed in the very building that now memorializes them, a wing of an infamous government complex that sits at 60 Andrássy Street in Budapest, Hungary. The Terror Háza Museum—opened in 2002—is a reminder of the mass brutality of 20th century wars and revolutions, and a monument to the people who played roles both inside and outside the building’s cavernous underground prison cells. It documents the period beginning in 1944 when the Nazis gained power in Hungary, to the early 1990s, when the Iron Curtain fell and Hungarians finally gained freedom from Communism. Hungarian architects János Sándor and Kámán Újszászy designed the museum as a monument to failed ideas and innocent victims. Working from a mindset beyond simple architecture, they recognized the need to create the right ambiance to guide visitors through recent history in a respectful and subtle way. Thematically, the museum juxtaposes the dual hazards of the Nazisupported Arrow Cross Party and the Soviet-backed secret police. This comparison is clear from the beginning. A large cross and a large star each cast shadows on the street below the building. These logos are flanked by the word “terror,” which casts its own shadow. The designers placed these features onto a

large awning that hangs over the roofline of the building, which otherwise appears unchanged from its time as a prison. Many of the rooms inside the museum have been preserved to appear as they did before Hungarian liberation. The director’s office is still luxurious, and his receiving area still resembles an Austro-Hungarian Imperial-era room that has been painted over so as to erase the memory of the past. There is even a limousine parked inside the museum, with its lights slowly rising to reveal plush red seating areas and champagne glasses reserved for the perpetrators examined throughout the museum. But just as the museum highlights the excess of criminals, it focuses on the deprivation and inhumane treatment of their victims. The architects preserved the expansive prison, which not only fills the basement of 60 Andrássy Street, but also had been expanded by the Communists into the basement areas of a number of other buildings on the block. Visitors descend into the basement in a slow-moving freight elevator that is illuminated by harsh fluorescent lights. The prison is generally dark and dank, and the only real light comes from the desk lamps that sit inside interrogation rooms. The gallows are preserved in their final resting spot, and artifacts from inmates line the claustrophobic corridors. Beyond preservation, the museum presents a subtly modern flavour on the upper

levels. A room resembling a church depicts the role the state-controlled media played in the terror. Its windows, floor, pews, and desks are plastered with pages from newspapers, and the front wall contains a television display that plays a video on the impact of misinformation and government propaganda. Religion, too, suffered under Hungary’s dual tyrannies. Dramatic sculptures and blue lighting characterize an exhibit that literally depicts political icons presiding over symbols of religious rubble. A long corridor with a rounded ceiling houses confiscated religious items in small alcoves, and the floor contains a long, illuminated cross that looks as if it has been exposed from a brick grave underneath. The room dedicated to the memory of the prison’s victims may be the most moving of all. Lit from behind, metal stencils with victims’ names line the walls, and low-level lights produce an ambiance reminiscent of a candlelight vigil. Brass plaques indicate the end of the road for the victims, and are capped with skulls and crossbones. There is also a room reserved for their aggressors, which depicts them in black and white photos on crimson walls. Spaces can convey deep levels of meaning in ways unlike any other form of storytelling. The Terror Haus is a well considered museum that simultaneously informs, impresses, and cautions. Its story is made that much more accessible by its modern design and high level

A Budapest museum remembers the tyrannies of the Nazi party and the Sovietbacked secret police. By Jan Lorenc and Richard Lorenc.

Review: The Terror Háza Museum, Budapest

of craftsmanship. The designers’ use of color, light, material, media, and era-specific furniture contribute to an intimate understanding of the place whose mission is now to teach, and whose visitors will leave with a better picture of the atrocities committed in the name of politics not that long ago.

Jan Lorenc is President and Design Director of Lorenc+Yoo, an Atlanta-based environmental design firm. Richard Lorenc is the director of outreach for the Illinois Policy Institute, the state’s free-market think tank, and he also serves as director of communications for Lorenc+Yoo.

[First published: segdDESIGN, No. 23 2008, www.segd.org]

Please contribute a review to Museum-iD. Email your idea to greg@museum-id.com

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Events: audience development, interactive galleries, exhibition design, architecture and heritage, brand identity and development

Identifying and Consulting AudiencesOne day workshop on Wednesday 23 September at Birkbeck College, University of London. Join a small group of museum and heritage professionals for a master class on audience development, consultation and communication in museums, galleries and heritage attractions. You’ll benefit straightaway from significant insights in to this crucial area and discover the very latest research and thinking by attending this important new one-day seminar at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre. Places are strictly limited at this essential, constructive and highly practical event to ensure maximum value for delegates. The seminar is split in to three interactive sessions hosted by world-leading professionals: Ben Gammon is free-lance consultant with 18 years experience in museums sector. Prior to setting up Ben Gammon Consulting in 2005 Ben was Head of Learning & Audience Development at the Science Museum, London and before that Head of Visitor Research. At the Science Museum he led their Learning and Audience Development Unit of over 100 staff. He was responsibile for devising museum-wide policy and commissioning and managing focus groups and surveys. Ben has a 1st Class BSc from University College London and a DPhil from Oxford University. Gina Koutsika is Head of Interpretation, Tate Britain. Prior to joining Tate in 2008 Gina held a number of positions at other leading institutions, including: Head of Gallery Learning, Audience Advocate, The Natural History Museum, Deputy Education Manager, Science Museum, and Director of Education & Communication at

Seminars and study days

The Foundation of the Hellenic World. Gina holds an MA in Museums Studies and a MBA. She is Deputy Chair of the Visitor Studies Group and European Representative of the Visitor Studies Association. Benedetta Tiana is a leading professional in the international cultural and heritage sector. As masterplanner and head of operations for the first Italian community centre she started work with different audiences, targeting young adults and teenagers. In the UK she works in the interpretation team at Event Communications, one of Europe’s leading museum design companies, where she has successfully delivered HLF projects including the Royal Institution of Great Britain and the Herbert Art Gallery. At Historic Royal Palaces she was charged with redeveloping the visitor experience at Hampton Court Palace. Since her initial years as a philosopher of aesthetics she enjoys debate on issues affecting museums.

Exhibition Design in MuseumsOne day study tour on Thursday 8 October in London. On this tour we’ll be visiting three leading museum design studios. On the tour you’ll have the opportunity to question principal designers and learn more about their design approach and philosophy. Each session allows you to go inside a world-class design practice where discussion and questions are welcomed. Transport between studios is provided, as are refreshments and lunch on both days. This tour is limited to a maximum of 15 delegates. To avoid disappointment please reserve your place early.

More about the design studios we’ll be visiting on the tour: Metaphor: Projects include the Grand Egyptian Museum, the redevelopment of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, Nam June Paik Museum, the Victoria & Albert, and the National Art Gallery, Singapore. Event Communications: Projects include National Museum of Dubai; Kelvingrove, Glasgow; Imperial War Museum North. Casson Mann: Leading exhibition and museum designers. Recent projects include the Great North Museum, Time Galleries at the Royal Observatory, the Energy Gallery at the Science Museum, the British Galleries at the V&A, Crimes Against Humanity at the Imperial War Museum, and the Churchill Museum.

Museum & Heritage Architecture This one-day study tour focuses on museum and heritage architecture. We’ll be visiting three leading archirectural practices to look at examples of both conservation and new-build architecture. The tour takes place on Wednesday 14 October in London. The tour includes visits to: Purcell Miller Tritton: architects who specialise in the heritage sector and conservation. Projects include the Museum in Docklands, The National Gallery, Weston Park Museum, and Wolverhampton Art Gallery. MRDA: established in 1993 as a specialist architectural practice with a particular interest in the conservation and rehabilitation of high quality architecture including historic interiors. The Practice also welcomes opportunities for new design in sensitive locations.

Brand Identity & DevelopmentThe importance of a museum’s identity and the development of its brand is an essential element of a successful museum. In this one-day study tour we’ll visit three leading brand agencies for the inside track on developing a new identity and raising brand awareness. The tour takes place on Wednesday 21 October in London. On the tour you’ll have the opportunity to meet and question leading consultants at some of London’s most respected and well known brand agencies. Transport is provided, as are refreshments and lunch on both days. The designers and branding agencies featured in the tour: Coley Porter Bell: leading brand agency, part of WWP, that has recently completed the new logo and brand work for the

Museum of London. Small Back Room: leading integrated design agency specialising in engaging audiences across a mix of channels, from retail design, brand strategy and identity to exhibitions and interactive. Clients include London Transport Museum, Tate Modern, V&A, Natural History Museum and Albertina (Vienna). Collectiva: an innovative, results-driven design consultancy who can create and express your brand across print and digital media to help you acheive your goal. Clients include London Transport Museum, Natural History Museum and Syracuse University.

To find out more about these events and others, and to reserve delegate places online please visit www.museum-id.com today

Praise for Museum-iD events:

“It was a most useful day. Carefully thought through and tightly focused. The speakers were judiciously chosen and it had a lively pace but with time for questions. I cannot fault it – it delivered everything you promised” Nigel Semmens, Director of Communications & Media, The National Gallery, London

“I found the day inspiring and useful. Myself and colleagues are benefitting greatly. The positioning of these events is spot on in terms of progression for the sector” Anna Salaman, Head of Formal Learning, National Maritime Museum

“I very much enjoyed the seminar. I loved the practical advice rooted in experience. Engaging speakers...very refreshing”Lynette Burgess, Learning Manager, Colchester & Ipswich Museum Service

“I thought the study day was excellent, very useful indeed. I think your more imaginative approach is great for professional development”Andrea Bishop, Director of Collections, National Motor Museum

“I found the day very interesting with lots of useful information. And great to catch up with colleagues from other organisations” Stephen Howe - Head of Programmes and Presentations, National Museum Wales

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ARE MUSEUMS ABOUT STORIES

OR OBJECTS?

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Julie Finch - Deputy Head, Museum of Bristol: “We live in a society that is fascinated with individualism, a focus on identity and understanding of ‘self’ from multiple perspectives. Consumerism has led to the development of a society that can express itself through individual iconology, values and beliefs. There is a real focus on how we, as individuals, understand the world and our place in the world. This is why the debate on stories versus objects is so prolific. The question is what should museums be about, what is their focus and how do they fit with the needs of a wide range of audiences (collectively and individualistically)? Individual narratives, stories from personal perspectives, engage and provide points of resonance for individuals. Whilst objects create debate, astonishment, interest, their provenance and impetus for collecting are significant to the story they tell. Collective narratives, from multiple perspectives, provide a way in for individuals to gain an insight into the lives and view points of others. Objects create collective impressions of a time or place or person/s or event/s or all of these things combined or just the objects themselves. Invariably, our visitors expect more, they ‘read’ the world in multi-faceted ways, information is fed to society in so many different ways, society is fascinated by the lives of other people. Understanding how ‘things have changed over time and in some ways have not changed at all’ is

Currently on museum-id.com we’re asking: Are Museums About Stories or Objects?A selection of responses are published

here. Now add your voice to the debate....

Are Museums AboutStories or Objects?

central to how audiences see the world. Most of all museums have a responsibility through their collections and the stories that are told to provide relevant and resonant visitor experiences that provokes questioning, the full range of human emotion, learning responses, and entertainment. Museums are about objects and objects provide the stimulus for story telling. New collections and collecting will need to represent its audiences and be undertaken in appropriate ways to capture the story of the donor, the political, economic, cultural, technological and environmental perspectives. Story telling must be presented from multiple perspectives, no one story should have more importance over another, each view point is valid. Involving people in the development of new exhibitions, programmes and development of services will aid the decision making process in devising which objects to collect, who for and why and which stories to tell. Art galleries should share the same principle, large national insitutions have a responsibility to understand their audiences and provide high quality, relevant, thought provoking displays. Narratives that are targeted at community engagement and specific audiences are not a panacea for poor quality. Museums and galleries in the 21st century must be relevant, resonant and of a high quality - story telling prioritised with collecting - objects linked to narratives - narratives and

objects meshed with society - high quality design and services that involve the public – and new collecting representing society today.”

Dr David Fleming, Director, National Museums Liverpool:“As the world of museums continues to evolve, and as the public’s expectations of us grow, it becomes ever more obvious that the role of objects is changing. Objects remain central to what we do, but increasingly the limits to their value as evidence is exposed. The role of objects in the International Slavery Museum is important, but as part of a range of devices that we use to bring the story of slavery and its legacies to life. It’s the stories that are crucial to our visitors.”

Steph Mastoris , Head of the National Waterfront Museum, Swansea:“The boring and safe answer is, of course, that museums are about both. Objects are central to the very existence of the museum, but without telling stories about them the museum is just a storehouse. For me, the key issue here is much more about whether the museum’s displays begin with the object or the story. I feel that the concept-centred display is far more robust and logical than one driven by what is available in the stores. The imperative to inform that lies at the heart of the museum’s purpose is best served when coherent narratives are on offer. Once these stories are established

the museum’s collections really come into their own by providing unrivalled sources of evidence. Indeed, such a clear narrative structure also enhances the more random inspirational powers that objects possess. It is so easy to say “let the objects speak for themselves”, but their language and their messages are often difficult to understand without a good narrative context. So we need museums that are story-driven, but object rich.”

Scott Billings, freelance journalist:“The appeal of museums for me is not so much that they hold objects collected and conserved over time, but rather that these objects embody *external* ideas, subjects or concepts. The objects prompt these subjects to be structured and studied - through curating and exhibiting - and then support the exploration of the subject with tangible evidence. The fact of the existence of the object in the case is almost always secondary to what it represents, for me at least. One of the difficulties in exhibition design lies in balancing the desire for rich, detailed information (such as you might get in a study book) on the one hand and the need to offer an entertaining and open experience that will appeal to a wide range of audiences on the other. Add to this the practical and conceptual limitations of exhibiting objects from museum’s store and the final space often lacks a full and satisfying coherence.

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I have been musing for a while about the possibility of a Museum of Grand Ideas, or something similar, which would pick a theme every year or two, research it, build a narrative and an educational structure and ‘write’ the exhibition in an arresting and entertaining way. Then, loan applications willing, objects could be hand picked to bring these exhibitions to life. If the ‘Grand Idea’ were gravity, in would go Newton’s and Einstein’s notebooks, a Copernican orrery and so on. If the ‘Grand Idea’ were ‘The Nation State’ objects and media could show how notions of boundaries, territory and national identity have changed through history - a history lesson with great objects basically, but where the objects are tailored to the pre-written story, not the other way around. As a writer with an interest in education, this focus on ideas, subjects and concepts and how they are presented - in other words, how it is written - really appeals. The objects provide the magic, but the story is where you start. Sadly, I suspect the Museum of Grand Ideas may not be practical and would be rather too costly without a wealthy and generous benefactor.”

Leigh-Anne Stradeski, Chief Executive, Eureka! The National Children’s Museum:“Most museums exist to collect, preserve, exhibit and interpret something of significant value that adds to our individual and collective understanding of the world. It stands to reason then, that museums would use their objects to tell relevant and meaningful stories making both -- story and object -- of equal importance to the museum’s mission. But in my view, museums are not about stories or objects; they are about the people who use them, researchers, students, children, families, scholars, schools, community. Perhaps this is why I have always been drawn to the children’s museum movement, where the child is firmly planted at the centre of the experience and the objects and the stories build up around them, reflecting their needs, respecting their uniqueness and furthering their understanding of the world and themselves. During the past quarter century, more and more traditional museums have moved in this direction and we have witnessed enormous and positive change across the sector and on a global level. Consultation with users is becoming the

norm, encouraging their input into the content and delivery of museum exhibitions and programmes and helping to shape the final product. Most importantly, collections and the stories they reveal, are being used to inspire, inform and transform individuals of all ages and the communities in which they live.”

Katy Tarbard, Learning Officer, The National Gallery, London:“I think that museums depend on both but more importantly on the people who bring both to life. Even when an object no longer exists (e.g many paintings have been lost over time to fire, war and other disasters) their importance can still be appreciated by others when their story is told by an enthusiastic individual. I love the idea of passing stories on by word of mouth and that a museum can spread knowledge in that way without the object even having to be present. On the other hand I also love the moments when you become stuck mid way through a talk because it can be so difficult to find words that can express what it is that is so uniquely present in the object itself.”

Now add your voice to this debate, and others, at www.museum-id.com

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Museums and the Political Landscape

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This article will discuss the fundamental union between museums and the political landscape and focus on whether it truly is possible to create a museum which is not only accessible and inclusive but relevant to the needs of society. Using the model of the International Slavery Museum (ISM), opened in 2007, a museum which although international in scope is first and foremost one which aims to be embraced by the local community and which through its permanent displays, exhibitions, publications and educational activities contribute to a changing public social agenda. That is, to become a tool for members of the public to use in such a way which will not only enhance their understanding of the past but how that past, and the many legacies which come with it, affect their current day to day activities, opportunities and aspirations.

IntroductionOne of the ways in which the museum aims to do this is to become an active supporter and vehicle of social change and indeed political campaigner in the field of human rights. This is done by highlighting continuing abuses and exploitation, some as a direct result of the legacies of transatlantic slavery such as the misguided belief of racial superiority or critiquing a system of global trade, still often seen as serving a small elite. The Racism and Discrimination section and Global Inequalities displays within the Legacy Gallery are practical examples of this.

Museums and the political landscape

The salient factor here is that the ISM team is not simply discussing or theorizing about this but actively working on it. Firstly, it has arranged a series of scoping days with some of the UK’s leading human rights organizations such as Anti-Slavery International (along with associated agencies such as the Metropolitan Police). The aim is to have a continuous dialogue with these organsiations and meet several times per year; led by the ISM Collections Development Officer, whose role it is to develop new collections policies for the museum (including contemporary slavery). The forum will allow both the museum and these agencies to work to mutually beneficial agendas. The human rights organizations are able to get across aspects of their campaigns to the vast amount of museum visitors to ISM which in turn gets to access their wealth of experiences within the field of human rights. This practical expertise will assist the museum when developing what could be a very sensitive and indeed controversial permanent collection relating to contemporary slavery. It could also be incredibly powerful and thought provoking enough for people to ‘get involved’. How did a museum such as ISM, with a thought provoking and controversial social change agenda come about? To start with its existence must be seen in the context of museums, which in the past decade in particular, have been created or redeveloped which present various degrees of alternative narratives and

forums of information to what we can call the traditional dominant narratives.

Section 1: Return and Get ItTo put this in context I will discuss the development of the field of African American archaeology which gives an insightful account of how that place, which in my view all museums inhabit whether or not they want too, the political landscape, has absolutely fundamental consequences for the development of a discipline, be that within the walls of a university or the walls of a museum. In the 1960s and 1970s according to the African American archaeologist Theresa Singleton in her seminal book “I, Too, Am America” African American archaeology ‘had a mission: to tell the story of Americans-poor, powerless, and “inarticulate”-who had been forgotten in the written record.’ Professor Leland G. Ferguson, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of South Carolina, noted that one of the reasons that the excavation of buried colonial African Americans began was due to the influence of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. At its height, in 1967, the Florida State Park Service made a landmark decision that would greatly assist the development of African American archaeology. They contracted one Dr. Charles Fairbanks of the University of Florida to excavate slave cabins at a state owned site called Kingsley Plantation. Fairbanks called this fledging research “plantation archaeology” with the University of Florida as the intellectual base. The work of Fairbanks seems to be a direct response to the visibility of Black activists who, like the larger Black community, demanded that Black history actually be addressed in the education system. Fairbanks believed that American heritage needed to be broadened and without him addressing the political questions of that period, African American archaeology would have progressed at a much reduced pace, if at all. The politicalisation of African American studies also fundamentally affected what became known as Black museums which were seen to have been born out of the Black political consciousness movement. This eventually led to the Black community gaining some degree of political power in both urban areas with large African American communities and state legislatures. This new found political influence enabled African Americans to gain access to

certain government funds, such as those relating to cultural institutions. As a result, the 1970s saw the first of many Black museums springing up in larger urban areas such as Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Black museums challenged the existing heritage presentation that existed in some of the county’s largest and most well known museums, such as the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C which was regarded as the pre-eminent national public museum in the US, an institution founded by Congress with a remit to collect and preserve the science and culture of America. While the Smithsonian Institution began to be seen as an institution catering to the interests and whims of upper class Euro-Americans, Black museums were seen to be the antithesis of this; engaging with current issues such as combating racist imagery and reconstructing self-identities and knowledge about heritage and achievements. Black museums were thus the tool by which the African American community was able to present their history to America.

Section 2: A Path Worth Treading?With this in mind, the question can be asked how can museums in the UK expand and develop if indeed it is not engaging with current political trends; debates and the great social ills and issues at every opportunity? Is it simply not acceptable that museums which are centrally funded, and where social inclusion in the words of DCMS ‘should be mainstreamed as a policy priority for all libraries, museums, galleries and archives’ not to actively campaign against such political parties as the BNP in elections? If museums are, in the words of David Anderson, ‘metaphors for the kind of society we have, and the society we wish to create’, then the answer is no. Museums must get involved in the great debate and indeed challenge such political parties which aim to stifle real social cohesion. I would say that there is not the political momentum today in the UK as there was in 60s America, even within areas with high BME communities, but ISM, as a museum which recognizes the fundamental need for social issues to be challenged and addressed can indeed lead on the discussion and become a place where BME communities for instance can use the museum as a resource and tool to highlight their own, rather than their perceived, societal priorities.

Dr Richard Benjamin, Head of the International Slavery Museum, on why museums need to stop being

neutral spaces and start becoming relevant to the needs of society...

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So where are we in the UK? Well, the debate about whether or not museums can indeed be social vehicles has been rumbling along for some years now. In 2004 the Cumberland Lodge Conference What are Museums for? looked at how social, economic and political factors impinged upon museums. For instance, one session focused on the question: What effect does the implementation of a social inclusion policy have on the collecting, exhibiting and research functions of museums? Helen Wilkinson (then Policy Officer of The Museums Association) acknowledged that, although museums had mostly attempted to embrace a social inclusion agenda, for many this had been, ‘a fairly flimsy and hastily-built tacked on extension to the grand museum edifice, in other words, it hadn’t been integrated into the building’. But it seems that there was deep suspicion at the time on the reason for the government’s social inclusion agenda. It was highlighted that in the 1990s museums had became aware that survival meant competing for audiences with other institutions in the leisure industry and that museums began to realise that the needs of their visitors were crucial. As a result museums were supposedly compelled to meet social inclusion targets which arose out of the DCMS social inclusion action plan to secure Government funding. The social inclusion agenda referred to here could be seen to have been partly born out of a report by the Social Exclusion Unit in 1998 titled ‘Bringing Britain Together: a National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal’. Policies were developed from the responses of Policy Action Teams (PATs). DCMS set up PAT 10 which focused on the role of museums in tackling such issues as unemployment, low skills and educational achievement, poor health and crime. I think that today it is true that museum directors and senior management teams are fully aware that increasing visitor figures would do no harm for future funding prospects but as long as a practical set of outputs other than increased visitor figures were discussed and placed before DCMS officials at the beginning of any capital project (if indeed there was ever that type of interaction) there is still scope for funding to be attained. A ‘less is more approach’, especially concerning time intensive work with small excluded groups, is a path worth treading and

as such should be put forward as a recognisable and achievable social inclusion output, alongside which financial support can be attained. At the conference Professor Frank Furedi (School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, University of Kent), claimed that crises in political legitimacy and domestic policy had led Western governments to devise strategies which would create new points of contact with their people - for example, the Government’s failure to meet targets in education and health care had encouraged it to impose social inclusion policies on museums, universities and other cultural institutions. In doing so he stated that this policy shifted the mantle of responsibility on to the cultural sector in exchange for funding as well as problematising the functions of these institutions. Speaking specifically about museums, Furedi described the detrimental effects that had resulted from politicising access and participation. First, as museums adopted new economic and therapeutic goals consistent with a social inclusion policy, their traditional functions had become impoverished. Second, by burdening museums with social inclusion targets, curators had become preoccupied with ticking boxes to ensure the financial buoyancy of their institution. This not only deflected them from their scholarly functions, but also deprived them of the passion to research objects and the enthusiasm to exhibit them. Valuing objects for the purpose of knowledge, appreciation and meaning had effectively been eclipsed by the social inclusion agenda. Here though I feel it is right to clearly state my view on the gap that exists between museumological theory (especially that which focuses on a social inclusion agenda) and the actual workings of a DCMS funded national museum. Academic commentators on museums in particular often seem to have an almost paranoid vision of the relationship between museum professionals and civil servants within DCMS. I am under no illusion that decisions on policy and strategy are not shall we say given an extra ‘focus’ by looking at comparative DCMS and government agendas but at ISM, which is as high profile as any national museum, it is not the decisive factor in strategic decision making. Now not everyone even agrees that a museum should indeed have a mission or try and change the society we live in. In fact 2001 saw a

full on assault on the social inclusion agenda in museums by Josie Appleton who believed that the politicalisation of museums was a disaster and asked why museums have thus so readily adopted the social inclusion agenda of the New Labour government? In her view, under pressure from the government: …museums and galleries, like other public institutions from doctors’ surgeries to universities to schools, are expected to take on social inclusion as a main part of their role. Under the banner of social inclusion, museums are now busying themselves building community relations, challenging prejudice and tackling unemployment. I cannot speak for other national museums at the turn of the millennia but as someone who became the head of a new national museum in 2006 this was just simply not the case. As Head, I oversaw all discussions and subsequent programming around the central ethos of ISM as a museum, without having Big Brother looking over me at all times. Those professionals within National Museums Liverpool who worked on ISM made strategic decisions as a group of people, with the express aim of making a difference in society. If on the most simplistic level that meant trying to get a 14 year old from the predominantly north end of the city to think about racism in Liverpool whilst looking at images of the murdered Black teenager Anthony Walker then that was the aim. That might have also been part of numerous government agendas in numerous white papers but that was not something which was strategically ploughed over at ISM before a decision was made. Supporters of Appleton might then also agree with her when she describes where the rot, so to speak, started: …the social inclusion agenda has not just been drummed into museums from without. It has been actively promoted by a new museum elite, many of whom had been running these types of projects for a decade. Many of these new museum professionals studied the MA in Museums Studies at Leicester University, many were left-wing social historians, and many went to work in Labour-controlled local authority museums. They seemed to hold the idea that museums, from the objects they chose, to the layout of their buildings and exhibitions, excluded ordinary people. Even though I fall into none of the above categories, I have to say that on the whole I

agree this was often the case with museums. Too simplistic, too idealistic maybe, but who benefits, or indeed who loses out, on whether I as the head of a national museum believe that to be the case? What really would be the worst-case scenario for a museum? To be boycotted by museum professionals, hardened culture vultures, what the researchers refer to as the ‘committed museum visitor’, willing to work on their visit and be fed information or continue to be off the radar completely of the traditionally hard to reach groups, the uncommitted, those who we might be willing to work but who need to be enticed by the ingredients of the museum? For me, there is no match. There is of course a fine balance to be had. Museums and indeed their collections are within the public realm, and as such it is not inappropriate I feel that museum collections, exhibitions and educational material on occasion are in unison to a degree with Government inclusion agendas. That said there does need to be a clear line between government officials making decisions on museums and how they fit into a strategic framework for funding activity and letting museum professionals manage museums along with their highly trained and dedicated staff. Now the reality is that national museum organizations, such as National Museums Liverpool, are a long way off having the full support in this area of all staff (particularly those who are not in contact with the public regularly) who often feel that their work needs a certain degree of autonomy from the bigger strategic issues. It is vital though in my view that they are made to feel part of any organizational strategic goal which might sometimes mean that there are some difficult times ahead with respect to the way they display; store or interpret the collections of which many see themselves as the guardians. It might be a greater debate for another day but it could be levelled at those who might not think that they have to engage with the public in ways which could develop some aspect of the social agenda that there is indeed no point in investing future core funding on new acquisitions. Rather those museums take stock of what they have already and break the cycle of collecting for a statistically small portion of the public who visit museums even though there are a record breaking number of visits to museums. At a recent Horniman Museum conference

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titled Exhibiting Slavery a fellow participant confidently announced that high profile national museums such as ISM would not be willing or indeed able to get involved in campaigns of a sensitive nature through their exhibitions or otherwise, as it might go against the current government agenda. One example given was the arms trade and whether ISM would be able to host either The Throne of Weapons or the Tree of Life, two of the most interesting and challenging recent acquisitions to the British Museum’s collections. Both have been made from decommissioned guns that were collected at the end of the civil war in Mozambique in 1992. Both are products of a project call ‘Transforming Arms into Tools’ which was established in 1995 by the Christian Council of Mozambique with the support of Christian Aid. Both exhibits are profoundly powerful. Such exhibits within the Legacy Gallery of ISM, with accompanying educational resources and high profile media campaign might well draw attention to an aspect of British international policy which might not be as popular as some of the governments other foreign policy based projects. I corrected them in no uncertain terms. Of course I realized that as a museum we must not be seen to support any particular political agenda as such but that is very different from highlighting issues of a political nature, especially if there are accompanying factors, which relate to the ethos of the museum.

ConclusionIn 2007 at the Identity, diversity and citizenship: Lessons for our national museums roundtable seminar event at the British Museum in association with The Institute for Public Policy Research key factors were discussed such as how national museums and archives have long been concerned with enabling the public to explore their heritage and identity and to understand different cultures; how they must provide a vital source of learning for other public bodies concerned with identity, diversity and citizenship and most interestingly that museums and archives are viewed as neutral, non-religious public spaces which people trust and where they feel ‘safe’. As a result museums are seen by the public as offering expert, non-partisan interpretation of their collections and provide an impartial space for open engagement and debate. If only I had been present it would have

been interesting how popular or misguided ISM might have been viewed. If I were to answer a question around demonstrating evidence of the public value of ISM in promoting understanding of multiple national identities and promoting community cohesion; I could point to the encouraging fact that the International Slavery Museums target for BME visitors in its first full year of opening was 6%, we achieved 11% compared to a figure of 4% for National Museums Liverpool as a whole and a local BME population of 5.2%. It is indeed difficult to measure the understanding and communicating of the value of museums’ work to the public but I will add that that when the sister of the murdered Black teenager Anthony Walker, Dominique Walker, recently referred to the Anthony Walker Education Centre in the International Slavery Museum as ‘my brothers room’ there had indeed been a very satisfying and thought provoking shift of ownership taking place. The fact that we see ourselves as a campaigning museum, actively getting involved in local and national issues and partnering like minded organizations like the Anthony Walker Foundation in Liverpool hit home when I recently gave a presentation at HMP Garth in Leyland, Lancashire about transatlantic slavery and the museum. As part of the talk I discussed why we named our learning base after Anthony Walker. In the group of prisoners were three from Liverpool who knew the individuals who had murdered Anthony. They claimed that the museum was helping stigmatize the accused as a ‘racist’ for the rest of his life. I countered that he had been convicted of a racially motivated attack but they were adamant he was not. Our views may have been poles apart but they had to begrudgingly agree with me that at least we were having an open discussion about it, something which they had only done because a museum, through my own work, was being used as conduit for that discussion. Even so, this still does not mean that I or the museum was impartial. First and foremost I saw it as an opportunity to challenge a misguided belief they had in their acquaintance and that the murder was not racially motivated. So I lay my cards on the table and say that I do believe it is my duty more than ever to make sure that the museum actively engages current issues, not only in an academic or museumological level but on a

grassroots level. By that I mean that all the staff that work on ISM must to a degree share its ethos and values. It is not acceptable that people sit at the ISM table with an attitude of ‘that is how it is in museums’, or ‘we cannot make a difference’ or even ‘that is not something that a curator does’. Recently, I, like many people awoke to the sad and frankly disturbing news that a representative of a so-called democratic political party in the North West gained a seat at the European parliament on an agenda of disinformation and distrust. I cannot help feeling that if we only had someone of President Obama’s stature in the UK now, someone to bring hope to a wide range of the public rather than focus negatively like so many politicians today on people’s differences with the aim of polarizing towns, cities, schools, work places etc, this might not have happened. Now I am not able to proactively support a political party, even though someone like the Green Party in the North West actively campaigned against a political party like the BNP on an anti-racist anti-BNP message. That said a museum which actively challenges racism and discrimination the museum does have a leading role to play in the fight to stop the growth of the far right in all its guises. If you disagree with me that is your choice but I ask: Who else other than museums has the tools and expertise to challenge such disinformation which has been put out around diversity; ethnicity and what it means to be truly British?

The concept cannot be summed up any better than Benjamin Zephaniah’s poem The British:

….Mix some hot Chileans, cool Jamaicans, Dominicans,

Trinidadians and Bajans with some Ethiopians, Chinese, Vietnamese and Sudanese.

Then take a blend of Somalians, Sri Lankans, Nigerians

And Pakistanis,Combine with some Guyanese

And turn up the heat.

Sprinkle some fresh Indians, Malaysians, Bosnians,

Iraqis and Bangladeshis together with someAfghans, Spanish, Turkish, Kurdish, Japanese

And Palestinians

Then add to the melting pot.

Leave the ingredients to simmer.

As they mix and blend allow their languages to flourish

Binding them together with English.

Allow time to be cool.

Add some unity, understanding, and respect for the future,

Serve with justiceAnd enjoy.

Note: All the ingredients are equally important. Treating one ingredient better than another will

leave a bitter unpleasant taste.

Warning: An unequal spread of justice will damage the people and cause pain. Give justice

and equality to all.

For every reminder of what hate can do by looking at an object such as the Ku Klux Klan outfit within the ISM Legacy Gallery you can see what the bringing together of cultures can do in our cultural transformations section. Take a look at the Black Achievers Wall, and in particular the Black British achievers and the inspirational sportspeople, actors and poets and tell me that their contributions have not enhanced Britain? It is frankly ridiculous to suggest otherwise.

An institution like ISM will continue to do all it can to stop the growth and influence of individuals and political parties who espouse division and hate. So hopefully in the very near future the Obama machine will visit the UK and give people enough belief in hope rather than hate. If ISM can assist with that message then I think it outweighs all the related theoretic academic and museumological debates which espouse otherwise.

Richard BenjaminHead of the International Slavery Museum

This article is based on the keynote lecture paper given at the recent Museum-iD seminar ‘Radical Museums: Democracy, Dialogue & Debate’.

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The National Trust’sEXPERIMENT

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It’s a familiar enough scene. You are visiting one of the National Trust’s 300 or so country house properties, possibly one you’ve selected from the members’ handbook while on holiday or the one that happens to be nearest to where you live. You park in the car park and make your way along the gravel walk to the house in anticipation of what you imagine will be a well-organised circuit of finely presented rooms followed by a cup of tea in the cafe. As you enter the front door, however, your eyes adjusting to the change in light levels, you slowly realise something different – and altogether unexpected – is going on. A fire has been smouldering in the hearth of the entrance hall. There are smells of cooking coming from the kitchens. You make your way up to the drawing room on the first floor. Here, music is being played on an old gramophone player. Newspapers and books are scattered on tables, as if recently discarded. As you peer over them, a room guide approaches, and invites you to read them at your leisure. Outside, you notice that a scratch game of badminton has started on the front lawn, the laughter of those playing drifting in through the half opened window. And could it really be that the drinks tray over by the fireplace boasts a half-finished bottle of sherry and several used glasses? While this is a fictitious account, it describes a very real experiment that is starting to take place at the National Trust. The ‘Atmospheres’ project attempts to bring the Trust’s unique

The National Trust’s interpretation experiment

properties to life, in a way that has never been properly attempted before. It is being run as a trial at a number of the Trust’s key sites in the West Midlands – including Berrington Hall, Croft Castle and Wightwick Manor. So far the response has been fantastic – people have started to see our properties in a new light, and to develop a much closer and more intimate understanding of their significance and distinctiveness. It’s an approach to interpreting our properties that we would like to repeat elsewhere, as we strive to offer the very best and most enjoyable experiences to our visitors. The National Trust is a significant presence in the UK tourist industry. We attract over 15 million visits to over 300 pay for entry properties, and more than six times that number to our free sites – countryside, coasts and open spaces of all kinds. The current economic downturn has been a challenge, but has also brought new opportunities. Increasingly, people are making the choice to spend their leisure time at home in the UK, reducing the frequency with which they make overseas trips on package deals or weekend breaks. It is perhaps too soon to tell whether this represents a fundamental shift in attitudes towards more sustainable forms of tourism, as opposed to a pragmatic response to the state of the currency markets and the good weather we have had so far this year. Either way, the Trust is benefiting. As of May 2009, visitor numbers were up 25% on the previous year.

Meanwhile our visitors are enjoying ‘time well spent’, as they rediscover the wonders of the natural and built heritage on their doorstep. It is often forgotten that the Trust is a major museum organisation. Indeed, we are the biggest single provider of museums in the country. Around 150 of our properties are accredited museums, equating to 8.5% of the museums in the country. We are custodians of an extraordinary treasury of over one million objects, dispersed across the country. We are a ‘national’ collection, albeit one that is managed wholly independently from Government, drawing our income from visitors, from donors, and from 3.6 million members – making us the largest conservation charity in Europe. Our collections are truly diverse, ranging as they do from important works of art, to extensive library holdings, to the sorts of everyday items on show at Mr Straw’s House in Worksop, an Edwardian ‘time capsule’ of a semi-detached home. As with other museums, these collections provide multiple benefits: entertainment, education, inspiration and the opportunity for serious scholarly research. We put a strong emphasis on learning opportunities at our properties: research shows that 93% of visits deliver informal learning outcomes. Across the Trust we have long-term links with schools to create opportunities for school children to develop their potential, their ambition, their creativity and imagination through contact with ‘the real thing’. The Trust also has a reputation for excellence in conservation and collections care. Our Manual of Housekeeping is acknowledged as a vital reference source for conservators worldwide. The sheer size of our collections and the special nature of the properties in which they are held means that we will constantly face a backlog of conservation work that needs to be done, while the funds available for this are inevitably constrained. Consequently we operate a policy of preventive conservation, only carrying out remedial conservation work where absolutely necessary. Our Textile Conservation Studio at Blickling in Norfolk is our only in-house conservation facility: other services are commissioned from freelance conservators. We are doing more to show and explain the sheer scale of our conservation work in action, by making this part of the visitor experience and by offering ‘Behind the Scenes’

and ‘Putting the House to Bed’ events. Over 1,000 visitors came on the opening weekend to see the results of our conservation of the Guido Reni ceiling painting at Kingston Lacy in Dorset. Volunteers are vital to our museums and to the Trust more generally. We are lucky to benefit from the help of 55,000 volunteers in total, a number that has risen over the last year. Without them, we would be unable to open many of our properties to the public. Our volunteers are involved in a wide variety of activities, from welcoming visitors and interpreting our properties, to carrying out essential cleaning and conservation work, to running learning and educational events. They bring local knowledge and understanding to our museums, enhancing their relevance to visitors. In return they have the chance to put something back into the community, to learn new skills, and to make friends. What does the future hold for the National Trust’s museums? Three strong themes stand out: partnership working, building links with local communities, and digital access. We already have a number of valuable partnerships, such as our 25-year relationship with the National Portrait Gallery. By displaying parts of the National Portrait Gallery’s collection at Beningborough and Montacute, we are able to bring nationally significant works of art within the reach of those who live outside of London. The Making Faces galleries at Beningborough combine high and low tech interpretation to bring to life an outstanding collection of 18th-century portraiture. We would like to develop such partnerships further, and to create a sense of our properties as offering a wide and diverse range of cultural experiences. This is why we are so excited at the recent appointment of a National Trust Contemporary Arts coordinator, funded by Arts Council England. The coordinator will be responsible for developing a contemporary arts programme at our properties, building on previous examples such as the Strange Partners exhibition that saw Petworth working closely with nearby Pallant House Gallery. Our work with local communities ranges from the London Voices project at four of our London properties (Osterley House, Ham House, Sutton House and Morden Hall Park), supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, to our work with the Punjabi community at Wightwick Manor near Wolverhampton. These projects help to enhance

Ben Cowell, Assistant Director of External Affairs at the National Trust, on how the organisation is changing and their new

interpretation experiment...

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the relevance of our collections to local residents, who otherwise might not have made the connection with what the Trust has to offer. We want to build on these projects to make working with the local community an ever greater part of what we do. It’s all part of our drive to draw out the local particularities of our properties and to emphasise their distinctiveness, recognising the enormous value of place to people’s quality of life. Our fundraising campaign for Seaton Delaval near Newcastle is a good example: we’ve raised millions of pounds already, and it’s all down to the solid support of the local community, who recognise the unique character of Vanburgh’s mansion and the surrounding parkland landscape. As with other parts of the museum world, we are also promoting digital access to our collections. The Trust’s Collections Management System is in the process of going live, enabling ready access to information about the many thousands of items in our care. At the same time, our new-look website is helping to give people new ideas on how to spend their leisure time. We want to use the internet in a positive way, to involve people more in what we do. Our ‘Treasure Forever’ promotion this autumn will invite members of the public to submit examples of objects that mean most to them. The winning entries will be displayed online, and at selected properties around the country. The National Trust is changing. To some extent this has been the case throughout our

115 years. Although we began (in 1895) as an organisation primarily concerned with the protection of green spaces and open land, we have gradually acquired one of the finest collections of buildings, art and antiquities anywhere in the world. The countryside and natural world will always be part of what we do, but so will our role as a museum service and as a conservator of objects and works of art. We want to continue to build partnerships with others in the museum sector, and to bring our buildings and collections alive, so that we offer unrivalled experiences ‘for ever, for everyone’.

Ben CowellAssistant Director, External Affairs

buriedtreasure

This underground storage vault stands ready to safeguard your cultural treasures.

Located at Dean Hill, a former Royal Navy defence depot, it is one of a number of vaults offering sanctuary to collections from National Institutions. It is equipped with the latest security and environmental controls and is approved for items covered by the Government Indemnity Scheme.

To arrange to store your artworks and artefacts away from the threats of fire, theft, flood and the city environment, contact us.

www.oxex.co.uk enquiries@oxex.co.uk

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Open Storage Access the future for museums

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When the second phase of Glasgow Museums Resource Centre opens to the public on 19 September, it will offer unprecedented levels of public access to a million objects during normal museum opening hours, seven days a week – a total of 362 days a year. Glasgow City Council owns one of the greatest civic collections in Europe. It contains over 1 million accessioned objects valued for insurance purposes at £1.4 billion, the city’s single biggest asset. The entire collection is a `recognised collection of national significance’ under the Recognition Scheme managed by Museums and Galleries Scotland on behalf of the Scottish Government. It covers an extraordinary range of collecting areas across the four major disciplines of art, technology, history and natural history. Since 2007 the charitable company Culture and Sport Glasgow has managed the collection on behalf of the city. Although Glasgow Museums has 12 venues, less than 2% of the collection can be displayed at any one time. Since the early 1990s, we had been looking for a way to make the collection more accessible to the public that owns it. Our solution has been Glasgow Museums Resource Centre, an open store that combines public access in the present with stewardship for future generations. Development of the first phase of GMRC began in 1998, in tandem with the planning for the refurbishment of Glasgow’s flagship venue,

Open Storage Access: the future for museums

Dr Ellen McAdam, Collections Services Manager for Culture and Sport Glasgow, argues their new open storage facility is a model for no-frills personal interaction with

museum objects that perhaps offers an alternative future for museums...

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. Like many Victorian museums, Kelvingrove had integral stores, and the project team decided to create off-site storage. This decision was based on the principle that space should be devoted to public services rather than back of house functions, which could be provided more economically elsewhere. After a false start with a former bus garage, it proved more cost-effective to construct a new store on a brownfield site on the south side of the city. The site had excellent transport links and room for expansion, and the project, funded entirely by Glasgow City Council at a cost of £7.4 million, provided a focus for the regeneration of the area. Phase 1, containing 200,000 objects from Kelvingrove, opened to the public in 2003. Access primarily took the form of guided tours, with school groups in the morning and public tours in the afternoon. Despite minimal marketing the tours were very popular, and in the first full year of opening there were 12,000 visits. Hard on the heels of the Kelvingrove refurbishment came a second major capital project, the new Riverside museum of transport. Like Kelvingrove, the existing Museum of Transport harboured hundreds of thousands of objects in a maze of stores behind the scenes. Unlike Kelvingrove, these stores were not custom-built, and the environmental conditions were poor. A second phase of GMRC formed part of the successful £17 million bid to the Heritage Lottery

Fund for the joint Riverside/GMRC 2 project. The total cost of phase 2 was £12.8 million, of which some 80% has been funded by Glasgow City Council. In planning GMRC 2 we learned from the experience of phase 1. We wanted to offer users the chance of moving beyond the passive experience of a stores tour to viewing and handling the collection at first hand in a series of dedicated viewing rooms. However, takeup on the two small study rooms in phase 1 had been almost non-existent. Visitor research in advance of phase 2 revealed that there was a very simple reason for this: visitors couldn’t order objects to view because they didn’t know what we had. We wanted to make it possible for members of the public to order objects from store for viewing as easily as readers order books in a reference library. With the exception of certain culturally sensitive artefacts, all the objects in the collection are accessible to the public. We needed a remotely accessible database that could be browsed by non-specialists. However, there is a standardised and widely understood system for cataloguing books by author, date and title. No such system existed to accommodate the hugely varied nature of our collection. In the end, we hit on the solution of creating a hierarchy of collection level descriptions, from the most general classification at Level 1 (art, human history, natural history and transport and technology) to individual object descriptions at Level 6. The

simple yet robust data structure of the database, known as the Collections Navigator, allows both specialist searching and non-specialist browsing. Once users have found objects they want to view, they can make an appointment to see them in one of three new viewing rooms. For individual users, there is the traditional silent study room. Groups can view and discuss objects in the group study room. For messy pursuits such as archaeological pot-washing or craft activities there is the excitingly named wet and dirty study room. Our existing education space will continue to support schools visits. All these facilities are complemented by a new reference library and archive block containing 30,000 books and our business archives and collection records, which will allow users to consult books and object files relating to the collection items they are studying. The store now houses around one million objects covering an extraordinary range of collecting areas: • Paintings • Prints and drawings• World cultures • Decorative arts• Arms and armour • Natural history• Scottish archaeology • Egyptology• Mediterranean civilizations• Transport • Ship models• History of technology •Musical instruments• Glasgow history • Costume and textiles

We are planning a busy public programme of events and activities based on these collections.

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We will offer curriculum-linked stores visits for schools, which have proved very popular in the past. For adults, we are developing a programme of themed guided tours. These will not only include the objects in the storage pods, but will take raise awareness of what is involved in managing a big collections by showing the work that takes place in workshops and conservation studios. In collaboration with the University of Strathclyde, there will be a programme of talks on the history of the collection. To help people get the most out of their visit to an object viewing room, we will also be offering study skills courses, covering object photography, technical drawing and cataloguing. Users will be encouraged to share the results of their object studies via the web site. Younger users are also catered for through a Saturday Club, a Young Archaeologists Club, weekend events and the Zest holiday programme. As well as being a visitor facility, GMRC is home to around 100 staff. These include the Open Museum, our award-winning outreach service, and our Major Projects and Research section, as well as other Learning and Access and Collections staff. The research section is the only one of its kind in a local authority museum service in the UK, and has succeeded in leveraging over £1.5 million of external funding for collections research, including three AHRC collaborative doctorates, an AHRC major research award and a substantial award from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. The section is working in

partnership with universities to make academics aware of the potential of the collection and the facilities at GMRC as a resource for teaching and research. We are just beginning to explore the synergy between the research section and the Open Museum and the insights this will bring to our understanding of the links between different audiences and collection areas. One of the advantages of being part of a large organisation such as Culture and Sport Glasgow is the opportunity this creates for building new audiences. We are looking forward to working with our colleagues in Arts, Libraries, Sports and the area teams to ensure that the full value of the enormous cultural asset represented by GMRC and the collection it holds is realised on behalf of the citizens of Glasgow and visitors to the city. We don’t know all the ways that new audiences may want to use the collection, but we are sure they will be unexpected and interesting. As museum display becomes increasingly complex, technical and expensive, perhaps the GMRC model of no-frills, personal interaction with museum objects offers an alternative future for museums in our post-credit crunch, climatically changing world.

Dr Ellen McAdam Collections Services Manager,Culture and Sport Glasgow

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‘I like Museums’ was an innovative promotional drive that brought together the museum sector of the North East in probably what was the biggest collaborative effort of its kind in the UK. The initiative marked a unique partnership between MLA North East, the North East Regional Museums Hub, Audiences North East and museums across the region. Its ambitious aims were to change public perceptions of museums and galleries, raise awareness of the number of museums in the region, and encourage people to visit more than one museum. The original idea came from a series of training sessions, led by MLA North East, which aimed to develop the marketing skills of museum professionals. Staff from eleven museums in the region worked with Tyne & Wear Museums (leader of the North East Regional Museums Hub) to learn about each element of putting together a successful campaign and the end result was to be an actual live campaign that promoted all the museums of the region. During the sessions, the group came up with the idea of using themed museum trails to link together venues across the region and help to cross promote what each of them had on offer. The group was unanimous in the fact that they wanted to focus on experiences rather than collections to hopefully appeal to a wider audience. In January 2007 after a competitive tender process, SUMO was commissioned to develop the themed trails idea into a summer marketing campaign encompassing design, print, digital media and media buying services, to be

When 81 museums in the North East joined forces to market themselves to the public,the pioneering campaign ‘I like Museums’ was born. Jim Richardson reports...

Marketing: I like museums...

rolled out across the whole of the North East. Target audiences were broadly divided into families, interested adults (those interested in culture but who tend not to broaden their visiting experience) and what have been coined ‘lazy socials’ – people aged 25-34 who like the idea of culture but rarely visit a museum. SUMO held brainstorming sessions to throw up potential themes and that in itself was a great opportunity for museums to share information about their venues and what they had on offer. Amongst the ideas put forward came trails such as ‘I like yukky things’, ‘I like a place to think’ and ‘I like dressing up’. Each trail was then market tested along with the visual style of the campaign, on each of the target groups by surveying over 350 people spread across each age group. The most popular nine trails were produced in leaflet format and distributed throughout all the museums involved plus a wide distribution network across the region. The additional trails found a home online. At the heart of the campaign was the website www.ilikemuseums.com and all elements of the campaign set out to drive traffic to the site. On a very basic level, the website was the first time such a comprehensive directory of North East museums had existed and was a gateway for the venues’ own sites. However, key to the success of the campaign was cross promoting the 81 venues so people were not only encouraged to go online to view the series of over 80 pre-set trails depending on what their interests were but they could also add their own. The aim was

to seamlessly link trails to museums to other trails so visitors could move around the museum landscape easily. Sheryl McGregor, Communications Manager at Tyne & Wear Museums said: “The most important part of the campaign for us was to actually get people engaged with ‘I like Museums’ and we wanted them to tell us what it was they actually did like about museums. We therefore wanted the website to be as interactive as it possibly could be. “There were so many trail ideas that came out of the training sessions that we were always going to use the website to highlight them all. However we also decided to give people the option of creating their own user-generated trails. As well as asking them to create trails, people were able to add comments about the places they visited which made for some great reading. “One thing’s for sure – people do have totally different reasons to visit museums and the website gave us an insight into some of those motivations. I mean if people are visiting because there’s a great pub next door where they can contemplate about our collections afterwards – who are we to argue?” The other benefit of allowing visitors to create their own trails was that people created trail titles that museums may not have wanted to come up with themselves. Museums may feel uncomfortable about wanting to promote themselves as a great place to go with a hangover but it works well when somebody else does it. Jack, the creator of that particular trail, highlighted the fantastic Victorian pub at Beamish for ‘a hair of the dog’, Lindisfarne Castle for some ‘big blasts of sea air’ and a contemporary art gallery to ‘take your mind off how you’re feeling’. It makes perfect sense when put like that. The website is the largest site dedicated to museums which allows people to comment and recommend museums to each other. Visitors to the site were also encouraged to rate the trails by their usefulness which means they can be ranked by popularity on the site. There was also a simple print option so that people could take the trails with them on their days out. Supporting the website and helping to drive traffic to the site was a large scale advertising campaign which included competitions and promotions in newspapers and on regional radio stations. On two of these, listeners were

asked to call in and tell the DJ what they liked about museums in order to win a VIP day out at a museum, while two local newspapers carried a competition to look for the next star of the ‘I like … museums’ adverts. Beer mats in a selection of hand-picked pubs also encouraged people to go to the site with a competition to win an Ipod as an incentive. Each museum played an individual role in cross-promoting other venues, with ‘I like … museums’ branded point of sale stands full of trail leaflets, posters and giveaways such as stickers and balloons, all designed to encourage people to visit another museum, or follow an entire museum trail. One of the more interesting audience groups that the campaign aimed to reach was that ‘Lazy Socials’ market. These are people who were in some way engaged in culture but didn’t visit museums or galleries very often, if at all. As a group who are not as open to traditional marketing methods, specific strands were developed to reach that target group. The most targeted of the Lazy Social part of the campaign was the Facebook advertising running throughout the summer. As most marketers know, social networking sites allow us to know so much more about our audience and Facebook allows advertising to be focused on people in particular towns and cities, of a certain age or sex and even with particular interests. In placing the www.ilikemuseums.com adverts, SUMO targeted the five biggest towns and cities within the area as well as specifying particular interests that matched the Lazy Social market. It was also easy to monitor the impact and see how much traffic was driven to the site through the banner ad. Over the eight weeks of the campaign, timed to coincide with school holidays, the website received over 12,000 unique visitors and over 48,000 trail views and it was clear that people were much more interested than engaging in the trails than using the A-Z approach. Rather than searching by name, location or their own self-defined genre, people looked for museums that related to their own interests or how they were feeling on that day. After the summer months Tyne & Wear Museums, who led on the campaign, wanted to ensure that the website had a longer life span and decided to use it for future collaborative

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projects in the sector. In the Winter of 2007, the website gained a second life to market an exhibition named North Face which brought a number of portraits from the National Portrait Gallery to ten venues in the area. The exhibition itself featured a number of famous faces with links to the North East so the ‘I like famous faces’ became a very popular trail during the life of the exhibition. Besides the trail itself, the exhibition was given it’s own dedicated sub-site which was totally integrated within www.ilikemuseums.com and offered money off vouchers for venues as a further incentive to visit more than one museum. The site therefore could be kept alive as a neutral space that unified many of the collections in the region and was a great place to promote joint-projects. Sheryl McGregor, continued: “Thanks to the North East Regional Museums Hub, more and more joint initiatives are happening across the North East and this site seemed like the perfect place to promote them. Not only that but it keeps www.ilikemuseums.com fresh and gives us another chance to market it.” During Summer 2008, it was again given another push. This time the focus was very much on the family market – the audience that research had shown responded best to the campaign in its first year. An events section was added to the site to promote Summer family-focussed events and exhibitions and all 81 museums were encouraged to supply information for the site. Because an approvals system is also built into SUMO’s Content

Management System, some of the larger venues were also given their own passwords to the site and encouraged to upload their own information. Sheryl Muxworthy, Communications Manager of Tyne & Wear Museums, explains why the partnership with SUMO worked so well: “We had worked with SUMO in the past so were confident of their creative abilities. At the pitch we were very impressed by their strategic and detailed approach, and the way they not only answered the brief but took it a step further. “The team had obviously done lots of research, which showed through in their creativity, methodology and general approach to a challenging brief that called for a fun, quirky and unusual campaign. “We were particularly pleased that both ourselves, and all the museums that took part in the training as part of the campaign, were able to get involved with Web 2.0 in a way that was low-risk for all of us. SUMO have a really good grasp of how best to build interactivity into their websites and it definitely also gave us all some ideas for the future.” I like Museums was a collaborative project, delivered by Tyne & Wear Museums in their role as the Leader of the Regional Museums Hub, but with the input of museums in the region. The whole project was funded by the Hub and through MLA North East’s Broadening Horizons project.

Jim RichardsonManaging Director - Sumo

Sumo is a specislist design consultancy immersed in the arts and cultural sector

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In August 2008 the National Media Museum in Bradford became the first UK museum to appear on Flickr Commons, boosting the museum’s brand while spreading its knowledge worldwide. The National Media Museum has established itself within the sector as the premier UK institution for TV, film, photography, new media and radio We’re a museum the region is proud of; 78% of its visitors are from our Yorkshire and Humberside hinterland . While the museum is a local powerhouse (one of the main reasons why visitors choose to come to Bradford), and is part of the NMSI non-departmental public body (also comprising London’s Science Museum and the National Railway Museum in York), in the physical arena the audience is largely regional. So when Flickr Commons first appeared online (http://www.flickr.com/commons), it was quickly established that this could be a fantastic opportunity to share some of the museum’s vast archive of over four million photographic objects and its knowledge with an audience previously unaware of the museum’s existence. Flickr Commons first appeared in January 2008, growing out of a conversation between the photo-sharing website Flickr and the US Library of Congress. Initially a pilot project to test how users could contribute data (through “tagging”), comments and feedback on a selection of photography the institution held with little accompanying data, the Commons was launched on 16 January. The lofty aim of the project: “Your opportunity to contribute to the world’s public photo collections”.

The National Media Museum became the first UK museum to appear on Flickr Commons. Peer Lawther talks through the opportunities and challenges they faced...

Social Media: Flickr Commons

The Library of Congress initially provided 1500 digitised photographs, covering two periods, “News in the 1910s” and “1930s-40s in Color”. The former collection covered events such as the baseball scandals of 1919 and the rise of New York City; the latter chronicled the Great Depression and the mobilisation of the war effort. It was a huge success; as former Flickr Community Manager George Oates mentioned in a blogpost, simply titled “Wow”, the next day: “In the 24 hours after we launched, you added over 4,000 unique tags across the collection (about 19,000 tags were added in total). You left just over 500 comments (most of which were remarkably informative and helpful), and the Library has made a ton of new friends”. We wanted to be a part of this burgeoning movement. At the Museums and the Web 2008 conference in Montreal a Science Museum web producer met with Oates to discuss co-promotion; she quickly recommended Flickr Commons as the best way to showcase the museum’s huge archive. A small task force to organise and oversee the launch and a release date were established. It was agreed that in deference to the Library of Congress and others on the Commons (including the Smithsonian, Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum and the Brooklyn Museum) that rather than releasing large sets encompassing hundreds of objects we would capitalise on the curatorial knowledge we held to release “small, discreet collections”, hand-picked (with accompanying context) by curators On 27th August we launched to international acclaim throughout Flickr and

the blogosphere; the first UK museum on the platform. We débuted with three “small, discreet collections”. For professional photographers we released Peter Henry Emerson’s “Images from ‘Pictures From Life in Field and Fen”, a wonderfully-evocative collection of perfectly-framed photographs of Suffolk and Essex taken in the late 1880s . For photographic historians, we also released a set of ‘Kodak No.1’ circular snapshots , a set of images from anonymous photographers chronicling social life on the cusp of Victorian and Edwardian Britain. And to entice the more general Flickr subscribers we gave them the spirit photographs of controversial medium William Hope. These photographs of ‘spirits’ pictured alongside the living, promoted at the time as a means for grieving relatives to have their dead loved ones alongside them for one final photograph, were taken in the 1920s. It was with this set that we achieved the deluge of comments, tagging and feedback. Flickr themselves called the Hope photographs “unbelievably curious” , and blogs across the world were equally fascinated, even if the images themselves brought out a range of emotions ranging from genuine belief in their provenance to all out incredulity . It was the same in each photograph’s comments. While some added sarcastic notes (“oh scary”, “boo!” and the like) other commenters talked about the photographic processes that could have been employed to ‘deceive’ the public in this way, along with additional contextual history on Hope’s life and work. The outpouring surprised us all; Hope’s images had been viewed irregularly – perhaps 20 times - throughout the dozen years the museum had owned them; to date the Hope photographs have been viewed around 400,000 times on Flickr Commons. The web’s barrier to entry is much lower, however the magnitude of the viewing statistics has been startling. Alongside the comments and the history lessons, we also received notice of other, previously-anonymous photographs that we’ve since positively identified as coming from William Hope, and further background details that we couldn’t have had time to investigate previously. The ‘crowdsourcing’ nature of the web, and the knowledge that the crowd holds, means that they

have infinitely more time to research than we could hope to undertake. We are now seeing the benefits of this on a daily basis. It’s not always been plain sailing however; internal challenges in how we approach freely sharing our assets have appeared. One such issue came with the commercial department’s remit to sell our assets’ IP rights versus Flickr’s proviso that all photographs would have to be listed as public domain, displaying the note “no known copyright restrictions” (with a link to the museum’s website stating as such). While our images are owned by the nation, we have to build revenue to plough back into our digitisation and archival processes. Additionally, in the spirit of the Commons, we wanted to use the word “share”, however this, understandably, is a loaded term. Would this undercut revenue generation? The abuse of images was also a concern; while the photograph resolutions were unsuitable for printing purposes, by giving free rein we would inevitably lose control of how the image would be used online, and to what ends. After discussions compromise was reached; it was decided that each photograph go through an approval process taking into account commercial and curatorial standpoints. If the perceived value outweighed any future revenue we could legitimately release the photograph on the Commons; if the image was worth more to us as a revenue generator, we wouldn’t display it. And the word “share” would be used in the disclaimer as long as we kept image resolution low. These discussions (and the more holistic idea of using the web for those who could never visit the museum that developed alongside our work), drew into sharp relief the need for an overriding digital strategy. This is now being undertaken, in an effort to satisfy both departmental remits and also to establish how we best use the wider web. Another further issue we’ve encountered has been one of time. For curators, hand-picking images for the Commons alongside working on bringing physical exhibitions to fruition was a welcome but extra burden, however by agreement the outreach was sanctioned at a top level in April 2009 when Commons’ work was officially added as part of their remit. We now work across the physical and virtual equally, in an effort to spread our knowledge globally.

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Since the first sets were released in late August we’ve added several more; in November 2008 Flickr asked each institution for one set to help commemorate the 90th anniversary of Armistice Day. We released set of photographs taken by renowned photographer Frank Hurley during the latter days of World War One . We also released two further sets late in 2008, one loosely based around the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and one tying into a physical exhibition highlighting the anthropomorphism of animals. We followed this with three new sets in June 2009; the first an initial foray into guest curation, using 16 images selected by renowned photojournalist Don McCullin highlighting his influences (to accompany a major exhibition of his work ).The second two sets complemented exhibitions, with imagery that we would have not otherwise selected for the physical gallery, due to space restrictions; on the web no restrictions apply and we’re free to explore the realms of ‘unlimited gallery space’. Again, both have drawn favourable comments and viewer numbers. The first year of the museum’s foray on to Flickr Commons has been an informative and ultimately rewarding one. We’ve now had over 750,000 image views, with around 2,000 comments and 4,000 tags. For a relatively ‘local’ museum, looking to display its assets and

knowledge outside its physical walls, it’s been a great success. One heartfelt comment gives this credence. In late November 2008 we received an email from ‘Jorge’, a Flickr user who had just viewed the Frank Hurley war photographs. In broken English he stated, “thanks a lot for letting me watch these photos [sic]. I think about these people and their difficult experiences.” Jorge is a resident of Buenos Aires, Argentina . From a national museum a year ago we’re suddenly global, fulfilling what a museum should do; giving our audience an emotional experience (wherever their touchpoint comes, either in the physical or virtual world), as Jorge’s email attests. We’ve learnt that the challenges to get us to this juncture were worth undertaking given the rewards for perseverance. As such, we’re wholeheartedly committed to Flickr Commons.

Peer LawtherNMSI Senior Online Marketing Executive

This article is based on a lecture paper given at the recent Museum-iD seminar ‘Social Media, Broadcasting & The Web’

Above: Speakers at the recent Museum-iD seminar ‘Social Media, Broadcasting & The Web’. From left: Matthew Cock, Head of Web, British Museum; Adrian Arthur, Head of Web Services, British Library; Mia Ridge, Senior Web Developer, Science Museum; Patricia Wheatley, Head of Broadcast-ing, British Museum; Clize Izard, Head of Creative Services, British Library; John Stack, Head of Tate Online; and Peer Lawther, Senior Online Marketing Executive, NMSI

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GREAT NORTH

£26 million Flagship Attraction Opens

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Newcastle’s Great North Museum, a new £26million flagship museum attraction for the North-East region, opened its doors to the public on Saturday 23 May. The new Museum is situated in the former Hancock Museum, which closed its doors in April 2006 to undergo its transformation, and houses internationally-important collections from the Hancock Museum, Newcastle University’s Museum of Antiquities and the Shefton Museum. The project has been led by Newcastle University in partnership with Tyne & Wear Museums, Newcastle City Council, the Natural History Society of Northumbria and the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne. The creation of the new Museum is part of the wider project involving the redevelopment of the Hancock Museum, the management of the Hatton Gallery and the development of an off-site store and resource centre. Displays at the Museum include Living Planet, an impressive double-height gallery featuring animals from around the world. The Fossil Stories features a life-size replica T. rex skeleton and a spectacular display of crystals and gems. There are interactive displays throughout the museum plus a dedicated under fives’ area. The Museum also features an interactive model of Hadrian’s Wall, which displays exhibits from the entire length of the Wall in the single greatest collection of artefacts from the Hadrian’s Wall World Heritage Site. Star objects in this

The Great North: flagship attraction opens

gallery include an inscription stone that provides conclusive proof that the wall was built on the orders of Emperor Hadrian. Visitors can also see the gold Aemelia Ring, believed to be one of the earliest Christian artefacts found in Britain. The temporary exhibition space is a 500 square metre gallery, which can be divided into three separate spaces, allowing flexibility in exhibition and event programming. It will be used to show a programme of changing exhibitions, including the British Museum’s Lindow Man, which opens on the 1 August. Gregory Chamberlain asked Alec Coles, Director of Tyne & Wear Museums about the flagship multi-million project:

What does the Great North Museum mean to Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums?

It is the culmination of five years of planning and development work and the blossoming of an incredibly powerful partnership. More importantly it is another great cultural resource for the North East of England and one that will be enjoyed by visitors to the region but, in particular, local people who have anticipated its arrival for a long time: this was borne out by the incredible response of 60,000 visitors over the May half-term, 70% of whom were from the region.

What do you think is the highlight of the Museum?

What gives it the wow factor?

Quite simply, the quality and diversity of the collections. This is museum with internationally important collections and these objects have bee made the stars.

You’re calling The Great North Museum a ‘flagship attraction’. What does the new museum offer to your audiences that they couldn’t get before at your other sites?

Access to these collections: the natural sciences, world culture, prehistory and Hadrian’s Wall collections are the most important that we manage. This will be delivered through the three GNM sites – the Hancock site, the Hatton Gallery and the GNM Resource Centre in Discovery Museum.

This has been a collaborative project where you have worked in partnership with, among others, Newcastle University and Newcastle City Council. What are the advantages and challenges of this approach?

Inevitably, at the outset, the different stakeholders in the partnership had slightly different perspectives and aspirations. What has characterised the partnership has been the willingness to work positively together. I believe that all five partner organisations should be hugely

proud of what they have achieved, what they have contributed, and significantly, the compromises that they have been prepared to make.

Costing £26 million, this project forms a major financial and cultural investment in the North-East in very difficult economic times. So what do you hope the new museum will achieve and provide for the region?

It will provide a source of inspiration for the people of the region, a superb visitor destination in Newcastle Gateshead, and a gateway to the environment and heritage of the North East. It is a world class desitation with world class collections and is already being recognised as such.

The creation of the Great North Museum has been made possible by £8.75million in funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), in addition to generous funding from a wide range of supporters including the European Regional Development Fund, One North East, Newcastle University, Newcastle City Council, TyneWear Partnership, Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Northern Rock Foundation, Garfield Weston Foundation, Clore Duffield Foundation and the DCMS/Wolfson Museums & Galleries Improvement Fund.

Great North Museum, Barras Bridge, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE2 4PT. Free entry

We take a look inside the new Great North Museum and ask Alec Coles,Director of Tyne & Wear Museums,

about the multi-million flagship project...

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Launched to great acclaim, the Great North Museum has been described as “jaw-droppingly impressive”. For those not in the know, it’s a combination of four existing museums and is an incredible mix of Prehistory, Roman Britain, Ancient Egypt, nature and the environment. Cogapp has installed 15 interactives and 10 AV presentations at the brand new museum. Our work represents about 75% of all the digital content in the museum, ranging from interactive maps to virtual seas, from CGI recreations of the Ice Age to audio stories from gods, priests and farmers. We’re proud and thrilled to have our work in this fantastic museum. We have a long history of museum installations, including the National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Shakespeare’s Globe, and Airborne Assault at the Imperial War Museum, Duxford. But what made this project a little different was the large number of deliverables and the incredible variety within them. The road to installation has been a long one; in this article I’m going to look at how we approached the project, what issues arose and how we addressed them on the long trip from ITT to installation day.

Setting the scopeThe scope for the interactive and AV elements was very well defined at ITT stage by the Great North Museum and their exhibition designers, Casson Mann. The project called for eight interactives based around a huge display of animals, four taking the user on a virtual walk of Northumberland, two interactive maps which would be projected onto a table top and one immersive look at how archaeology can help us understand how people lived in medieval times. And this was just the interactives - the AV included large scale recreations of the sea, an Egyptian frieze... and a sound and light journey into the afterlife. Quite a varied selection!

Ian Smith - Head of Interactive at Cogapp - on the process of creating and installingthe digital content at the Great North Museum...

The Great North: interactives installation

Budgets and workplansFollowing on from winning the competitive tender to supply AV and software interactives, Cogapp employed two main tactics to keep on top of all these various deliverables. Firstly, the production of interactives and AV were overseen by two creative producers (with one project manager keeping an eye on budgets and schedules). Secondly, as part of the original tender we had provided the client with a budget showing each deliverable as a separate work package with its own costs; any general costs from the entire project (project management, expenses etc.) were averaged out over each work package. We used this work package approach across all stages of the project and were able to track the progress of every deliverable.

Hardware considerationsAll hardware was to be provided by another company and so we had to ensure that all our software would work on the chosen platform (XP) and crucially on the available touchscreen resolutions. The AV deliverables were due to be served from dedicated hardware, which displays at standard MPEG2 (or DVD) resolution. This was more than fine for most of the deliverables but for three - the journey to the afterlife, the virtual sea and a digitally recreated Mithraen Temple - the final projection size was so large-scale that individual pixels would be upwards of 4mm each, ruining the effect of the presentation. So at that very early stage in the project we decided - in conjunction with the Museum and the hardware supplier - to swap the dedicated video servers for PCs, and that Cogapp would write some bespoke video player software to run the movies, thus enabling us to double or even triple their display resolution. A little more work for a much better end result.

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InteractivesThough we created 15 interactives for the Great North Museum, we managed to keep costs as low as possible by using only three separate software ‘engines’ to control them. All of these engines were written in Flash and designed to run on Windows XP. For this article I will concentrate on one of the engines, which was used to deliver 12 separate interactives. When visitors first enter the museum they are greeted by the massive Diversity of Life wall. Two stories high and running the entire length of the opening gallery, the wall is home to hundreds of animal specimens, grouped into Tropical, Temperate, Desert and Polar regions. It would be impossible to provide useful signage in this environment - and that’s where digital comes in. We built eight interactives which give users access to a digital recreation of the wall and lets them find out more about each animal. It’s a simple idea but the beauty of it is in the execution; there is almost no interface and the interactive does only a few things - but very very well. Using the same core data we created eight interactives which are dotted around the Diversity wall. Building on the same software engine that we created for Setworks Benches, Virtual Walks takes visitors on a self-guided tour of beautiful Northumbrian landscapes. Again, simple and elegant were the key; we commissioned local photographer Graeme Peacock to produce the photography which - as Winter 2008 was rapidly approaching at the time - was no mean feat on his behalf. Again there is very little interface, the beautiful panoramas draw users in and some very simple on-screen instructions help them to get started. Finally, a wealth of ‘hidden’ information and ambient animations of birds, leaves falling etc. bring each large-scale panorama to life. What we tried to do with these interactives was to create simple and beautiful installations that provide exactly as much content and interaction as is appropriate for the particular space. It is unlikely that visitors will stand by the touchscreens for more than a few minutes at a time so the challenge is to give them as much information as quickly and engagingly as possible. Although it can be tempting to offer users masses of information, we must strike a fine balance - there’s no point providing reams of information for an installation with a dwell time

of minutes. Really it’s a question of context – although in this case it was not appropriate, more information might have been appropriate for a study or education zone.

Audio visualFor the AV presentations our main challenge was to strike the right balance between the variety and scale of the operation and the limitations of our budget, never forgetting that the audience’s experience is really what counts the most. For the glass-bottomed boat exhibit, the museum wanted to create the effect of looking over a parapet onto a plate of glass with temperate sea creatures swimming beneath it. So we needed to provide moving images of a whole host of creatures, from Minky Whales to turtles and starfish, as viewed from above. Of course, the problem for us was that most of the time, anybody who videos fish will do so in the water, face to face with them, not looking down at their dorsal fins! The first solution was to computer generate them, but again, it just wasn’t possible to do this within our budget. Instead, our AV producer Michael Danks took his camera to several Sea Life Centres on the South Coast and dangled it into the water to capture footage of all kinds of creatures from above. Next, we discovered a simple trick to depict whales from this point of view. These creatures often swim on their side, so there’s plenty of footage of them swimming by with their backs to the camera. When the display is seen from above, this gives you just the right effect. In a way, a lot of what we did for the AV was based on illusions. To a certain extent, editing and special effects are all about fooling you into believing things aren’t quite what they really are. The point is to engage the audience by creating the effect originally intended, and without being dishonest, you can always come up with ways to get around the inevitable limitations that come with this kind of project. The Egyptian Journey to the Afterlife was probably one of the most gripping displays we worked on. Here, visitors enter a tunnel and, guided by the Goddess Maat, experience a journey to the afterlife as described in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. You’re taken through a series of challenges known as the Hours of Darkness that determine your ultimate fate: heaven or hell.

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The designers decided to depict 5 of the 12 Hours of Darkness, and we picked the ones which would transfer most easily to an ambient AV format, since the pictures would be projected onto the area where the visitors themselves would stand. All the sections, including deep sands, a pit of snakes, and flames of hell were created using 3D animation techniques and were designed to transition seamlessly into one another. Sound was a vital, powerful dimension for this particular experience. For example, in the ‘Abyss’ Hour of Darkness, which represents utter nothingness, it was in fact useful to have a subtly disquieting drone, as opposed to silence. We think that, when displayed within an enclosed space, these AV effects combine to create a truly memorable experience. Working on the exhibit in the dinosaur gallery was a real highlight for us, mostly because of the sheer impact of the finished piece. Here, we created content for four different screens, one in each corner of the room. The screens each show unique content but are synchronised to provide an attention-grabbing burst of activity (for example, a T-Rex roaring) every now and again, to make visitors stop for a moment and go, ‘wow!’. The museum imagined the screens acting as a ‘window on a prehistoric world’, showing moving images of ancient life. Yet the costs of doing that sort of thing from scratch are enormous. So, thanks to the BBC Motion Gallery we were able to repurpose selected Walking With Dinosaurs footage for this exhibit. Once we had the footage, the real challenge was to re-edit the material to tell the story we wanted to tell, rather than the one the program makers wanted to tell. We were also limited to the length of footage that the storytellers used, which was certainly in short supply in this case! Through smart editing of both sound and video, we transformed the footage into a museum gallery experience, which was what it was originally intended for.

InstallationFinally we reached installation. As anyone involved in museums will tell you, this is best described as controlled (or not-so-controlled) madness. There’s a scene in the movie Shakespeare in Love when the theatre manager, beset by financial woes, unreliable writers and the Master of the Revels threatening to shut him down, simply shrugs his

shoulders and says, ‘It’ll all work out alright in the end. I don’t know how, but it always does.’ Launching a new museum or gallery is very like getting ready to launch a stage show – things can, at times, seem crazy until the last moment, when it suddenly all falls into place. In the end we made two installation trips to the Great North Museum: the first to install the bulk of our content whilst the museum was being finished off, the second a ‘belt and braces’ trip just before the official launch. Both visits were busy, exhausting - and exhilarating! No matter how much you plan in advance it seems there are always a few things that trip you up when you actually install. The more you can test on sample hardware before installation the better - but of course this is not always possible... It’s always useful to have someone technical with you on installation trips - preferably one of your programmers just in case something goes wrong or specifications get changed. And here’s another top tip: 3G broadband access has proved to be a real boon to us in recent months; there was no internet access at the Museum which meant that getting updated files or fixes would have been very tricky without our ‘dongle’! The road to installation has been a long one for Cogapp, running from August 2008 to May 2009, but it has been an exciting and rewarding journey for us. The museum is a fantastic tribute to everyone that has worked so hard on it - do go and have a look around when you get the chance, and don’t forget to try out some of those interactives.

Ian Smith is Head of Interactive at Cogapp

Web: www.cogapp.comBlog: http://blog.cogapp.com/author/ian-smith

Images by Eleanor Rudge at Cogapp

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Conservation storage, equipment and display specialist Conservation By Design (CXD) supplied the new Great North Museum with over £1 million worth of Rothstein bespoke showcases. The project was a demanding brief – with over 90 individually designed cases to be manufactured to order and installed at the museum by the end of 2008. Great North Museum turned to Conservation By Design after being let down by another supplier who couldn’t deliver the project. Conservation By Design have a wealth of experience delivering Rothstein showcases to such prestigious institutions as the Museum of London, the National Gallery of Scotland and the National Museum of Ireland – so were confident they could meet the demanding brief. Design work for the project commenced in May 2008, with Conservation By Design working closely with the University to design each of the unique cases. Denise Troughton, marketing manager for Conservation By Design, said: “Our involvement in the Great North Museum project shows that Conservation By Design are able to deliver complex bespoke products against tight timescales. We supply a vast range of conservation products, from individual items used in the restoration and preservation process through to large display products such as the Rothstein cases being installed at the Great North Museum.” Rothstein have a 20-year pedigree for delivering showcases for museums and galleries around Europe. High-tech German engineering

Conservation storage, equipment and display specialist Conservation By Design (CXD) supplied the Great North Museum with over £1 million worth of bespoke showcases...

The Great North: bespoke showcases

mean Rothstein showcases are frameless, with mitred glass panels, sealed dustfree or airtight, with conservation grade silicone which is both durable and flexible. The hinged door design is a unique feature which enables easy access to 100% of the case interior. Conservation By Design are the exclusive agent for Rothstein in the United Kingdom and Eire, offering an expert partnership able to handle even the most complex of projects.

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OPERA Amsterdam

Retrospective

Museum Twentse Welle, Enschede, The Netherlands (2008)

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Museum Twentse Welle, Enschede, The Netherlands (2008)National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden, The Netherlands (2007)

Museum of World Culture, Göteborg, Sweden (2004)

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Mammal Gallery, National History Museum at Tring, UK (2009)Siebold House, Japanese Cultural Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands (2005)

Grote Kerk Dordrecht, Dordrecht, The Netherlands (2009)Young Henry, Hampton Court Palace, Surrey, UK (2007)

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The National Museum of Denamark, Brede Værk Industrial Museum, Denmark (2009)

The National Museum of Denamark, Brede Værk Industrial Museum, Denmark (2009)

Museum-iD Special Feature:OPERA Amsterdam Retrospective

OPERA Amsterdam’ s portfolio contains several large-scale museum interiors and major exhibition designs. Their latest project, The National Museum of Denamark, Brede Værk Industrial Museum in Denmark, has just opened to the public.

© Photographers for this feature: Pieter Kers (National Museum of Ethnology, TwentseWelle, Nieuwekerk Amsterdam, Museum of World Culture); Richard Thwaite (Tring); and Mike Bink (Brede Værk)

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The National Museum of Denamark, Brede Værk Industrial Museum, Denmark (2009)

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JANVS Design has been appointed by Rugby Borough Council to redevelop the Webb Ellis Rugby Football Museum later this year. The museum is the site of the first rugby football workshop and the building with the longest continuous connection to the game. It houses international rugby memorabilia. The redevelopment will bring the displays up to twenty-first century standards, increase the level of interactivity whilst preserving the historical atmosphere of the famous workshop.

simon.hill@janvs.com

Rugby Museum Redevelopment

Retail interior specialist Lumsden at Small Back Room is redesigning all the retail stores in the British Museum. Lumsden at Small Back Room was appointed following a four-way competitive pitch in February. They have been tasked with redesigning four retail shops within the museum, including two in the Great Court. As well as designing the four stores and their individual branding, Lumsden will create five standalone kiosks in prime locations near to destination objects and galleries.

c.lumsden@smallbackroom.co.uk

New Shops at British Museum

Ocean Design have recently completed projects for Hereford Museum Resource & Learning Centre; the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry with its “In Store” feature and at the Towner, Eastbourne where the use of glass fronted storage and specially designed Picture Racks allow the public a greater view of collections. Ocean Design is also currently involved in installing eight new stores for the Ashmolean, Oxford where similar techniques will enhance guided collection tours.

humphreys.martin@gmail.com

Accessible Storage Projects

Conservation By Design (CXD) has supplied the National Museums Liverpool with a range of bespoke Rothstein showcases for the new ‘Ancient Egypt’ gallery at the World Museum. Rothstein cases are frameless, with mitred glass panels, meaning that visitors have an unhampered view of the inside of the case from any angle. The cases are sealed airtight with conservation grade silicone to help keep the ancient artifacts safe for years to come.

kevin.boughen@conservation-by-design.co.uk

New Showcases in Liverpool

Visitors to the National Trust’s Osterley House in Middlesex can now tour the interior of the neo-classical house using a handheld Orpheo Neo video guide from ATS Heritage. In addition to a main tour there is a family tour, a specialist BSL tour for hearing impaired visitors, and an audio tour for visually impaired guests. ATS Heritage believe that the project will revolutionise the way that interpretation is delivered to audiences. This is not just ‘enhanced audio’ or images with sound but immersive content.

mike.howie@advanced-thinking.co.uk

New Atmospheric Video Guide

In response to growing demand from customers to store objects in a high security location, Oxford Exhibition Services has taken on a former Royal Navy defence depot. The new store is temperature and humidity controlled and inspected and approved for UK government indemnity. Insurance premiums can be reduced by the use of a secure external facility and OES is anticipating a very busy time over the next few years. OES also provides Transport, Art Handling and Project Management services.

michael.festenstein@oxex.co.uk

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Preserving your reputation in conservation since 1914

T: +44 (0)1908 375524F: +44 (0)1908 373658

E: sales@ryderbox.co.uk

Conservation storage, equipment and display specialist Conservation By Design (CXD) supplied the new Great North Museum with over £1 million worth of Rothstein bespoke showcases. The project was a demanding brief – with over 90 individually designed cases to be manufactured to order and installed at the museum by the end of 2008. Great North Museum turned to Conservation By Design after being let down by another supplier who couldn’t deliver the project.

info@conservation-by-design.co.uk

£1 million Bespoke Showcases

The Mobile Scanning Company, specialists in museum quality on-site digitisation, have launched their new initiative to allow heritage collections to benefit from superior pricing structures and a unique digitisation process called ‘Digitisation for the Nation’. Collections can be scanned in smaller batches over months or years and invoiced in these smaller batches until the project is complete someway down the line. Smaller collections can join with others to make a bigger ‘buying group’ to reduce costs further.

jon@mobilescanning.co.uk

Digitisation for the Nation

On the 20th May Queen Margrethe of Denmark opened the new museum ‘Brede Vaerk’ at Denmark’s biggest protected industrial plant. Together with the National Museum of Denmark OPERA Amsterdam developed a permanent exhibition that shows the huge industrial development in Denmark over the past few centuries. This new project joins OPERA’s broad portfolio of large-scale museum interiors and major exhibition designs.

jo@opera-amsterdam.nl

New Museum Opens in Denmark

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Family favourite

Oxford University Museum of Natural History

Collection & Space Surveys ~ Design Layouts ~ Feasibility Studies ~ Installation & Project Management 

The Great North Museum Newcastle

THE GREAT NORTH MUSEUM, NEWCASTLE

Doors opened on 20th May 2009 to the formerlyknown Hancock Museum now The Great

North Museum set in the heart of Newcastle.

Designed by CassonMann, Beck was appointedto undertake the iconic exhibit fit out spread

across 10 galleries combining over 3,000 collectionsnow on display. Amid the collections and within theDiversity Gallery is a vast arrangement of specimens

from desert, tropics, temperate and polar regionsinhabiting a bio wall, with live animal tanks and

aquaria bringing the entire display to reality.

MUSEUM FABRICATION, INSTALLATION& PROJECT MANAGEMENT SPECIALISTSVICTORY HOUSE, COX LANE, CHESSINGTON, SURREY, KT9 1SG+44 (0)20 8974 0500 WWW.BECKINTERIORS.COM