OpenCulture

The Collections Trust has been commissioned to deliver the Community Engagement strand of Stories of the World, one of the 10 major projects of the Cultural Olympiad in the run-up to 2012.

Stories of the World is enabling 14 museum projects to deliver innovative exhibitions which have been co-curated with their audiences, which include children and young people. The aim of our programme (which we are working on with the National Youth Agency) is to work with these delivery partners to ensure that their Community Engagement has the maximum possible impact.

Today, an audience of museum, archive and library professionals attended the CollectionsTrust’s ‘Collections, Communities and Stories of the World’ event at the London Transport Museum. The main focus of the event was on the emerging theme of democratic interpretation of collections, based on the Revisiting Collections methodology developed jointly by MLA London and the Collections Trust.

As Sam Mullins pointed out in his introduction, this theme is not new, especially to Social History Curators - museums and archives have been collaborating with their users for decades. This was a theme which Roy Clare, CEO of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council picked up in his excellent joint session with Programme Leader Isobel Siddons.

Roy had two announcements to make - the first was that the Renaissance Review (and MLA’s response to it) is to be released to the press next Wednesday. The second was that alongside this, MLA would be launching Leading Museums, its forward strategy for the sector.

Leading Museums has, according to Clare ‘people responding to Collections’ at its ‘Corinthian heart’ - he said that a more open, democratic and dialectic approach to interpreting collections, such as that embodied by Revisiting Collections, was central to all of our future ambitions for the sector.

He made an interesting observation when he noted that museums and archives have still to embrace the principles underlying Web 2.0 in the delivery of their analogue/real world services, but that we have to ‘break down the walls and allow the public to respond freely and even forcibly…to Collections’.

This theme became the motif for the day - Professor Helen Weinstein, Director of the Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past at the University of York,returned to it in her brilliant presentation highlighting the institutional barriers to achieving a more representative approach to Collections interpretation. Using John Kotter’s 8-step model of Organisational Change, she highlighted the need to empower people across the organisation to rewrite the social contract with users and to embrace the opportunities of participative interpretation.

Following Professor Weinstein was Liz Mitchell, Interpreration Development Manager at Manchester City Galleries who gave an inspiring account of the Revealing Histories: Remembering Slavery project which ran in parallel with Revisiting Collections. Liz looked at the practical realities of sharing the interpretative process with users, the challenge to notions of authority and ultimately the rewards of deeper, richer engagement.

Rebecca Lee of the Yorkshire Hub presented the Yorkshire Hub’s China in Yorkshire project - which was one of those projects which brings a great, broad grin to your face because it does so well what it sets out to do, in this case, engaging with the local Chinese elder community.

Caroline Reed, Collections Trust’s Stories of the World Project Manager, did a great job of introducing Revisiting Collections, and of launching the excellent new updated toolkit, available from the Collections Link website.

John Newman also introduced the Revisiting Archive Collections Toolkit - the companion version to the Museum one. John’s presentation was insightful and thoughtful, looking at the destabilisation of established power structures in archives and the combined forces of Web 2.0, consumer-focussed culture and national social policy. He talked about the challenges of User-Generated Content for archives, and the need to re-focus the role of archivist as an expert mediator, rather than a single authoritative voice.

Janet Nixon of Surrey Heritage gave an interesting insight into her experiences of implementing the Revisiting Collections methodology in her archive, and the way in which it drew different types of users in different ways (a fascinating example of people hovering around the event, but unwilling to enter - torn between wanting to engage and being afraid of lending their voice to the archive).

Finally, the brilliant Martin Harrison-Putnam gave an oversight of the London Transport Museum’s experience of implementing User-Generated Content alongside their Collections Management System, and gave some interesting examples of the type of rich narrative which people contribute when you give them a voice.

Overall, then, a really invigorating day which really underlined quite how much enthusiasm there is for a new approach to Collections interpretation as a process which museums and archives share on equal terms with their users. Great stuff and a fantastic foundation for a more Open Culture!

This entry was posted on Monday, July 20th, 2009 at 7:54 pm and is filed under Events, Nick Poole. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.