A Sense of Place

The Museum of English Rural Life (part of the University of Reading’s Museums and Special Collections Service) was recently awarded the largest grant in the first round of the Esmee Fairbairn Collections Fund, via the Museums Association, for A Sense of Place.

Find out how you can get involved with the project at the MERL Jubilee Village Fete by visiting the Your Sense of Place page. 

The aim of the project is to turn the traditional museum catalogue into a more flexible and interactive resource, engaging and connecting audiences with our collections in terms of relevance to geographical, historical and cultural contexts. MERL, like almost every museum, faces the challenge of how to help visitors interpret their experience of historical artefacts removed from their original contexts. To achieve this we need to explore new forms of user-friendly Information and Communications Technology (ICT) that will help audiences access and make use of our collections data in new and more meaningful ways.

We have already consulted a range of organisations and individuals. These include We are What we Do, the owners and managers of HistoryPin. Here Google forms the main partner in a scheme that encourages communities to share images of their locality by ‘pinning’ them to virtual maps. It is to be hoped that MERL object collection data could be deliverable through a resource based on this model.

We have also been collaborating with iMuse, a local charity that works to support people with disabilities to make better use of ICT. This offers a significant opportunity for MERL to trial the delivery of its collection data both to this specific set of users and to a wider set of handheld owners and operators.

A Sense of Place will be delivered through a steering group, consisting of staff, specialist advisers and other stakeholders, including volunteers and museum visitors. The project director is the Curator of Collections & Engagement and the day to day activity will be led by the Assistant Curator who will be the line manager for the three project officers.

(See our original announcement, made on July 19th 2011, on the news page.)

Project news

To keep up to date with progress on the project, visit the Sense of Place blog