Within ‘the heritage sector’ we compartmentalise its different aspects. Museums, libraries, archives as guardians and interpreters of collections. The historic environment sector as recorders of the built environment and historic landscapes. Archaeologists who excavate, record and analyse material remains. Then there’s natural heritage, everything about our world that isn’t human made. The subject divisions proliferate [...]
Archive | Museums RSS feed for this section
Google Street View for Art Galleries: The Google Art Project
I’ve just spotted the Google Art Project. It allows you to explore a selection of art galleries from around the world as you would explore an area on a map via Google Street View. An interactive layer provides an indication when an artwork can be viewed in detail on a separate page, with magnification tools [...]
The Science of Noah's Ark
After ages, a meaty debate has been developing on the Group for Education in Museums Jiscmail list. It centred around an initial post by Richard Ellam on the Council for Learning Outside the Classroom (CLOtC) decision to award their quality badge to Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm. On balance the response from list members has been [...]
Google plans to digitise the Iraq National Museum's collections
Putting aside any cynicism about publicity stunts, it is interesting to see Google announce that they are ‘digitising’ the collections of the National Museum of Iraq. The story on Reuters claims that 14,000 photos of the artefacts will be published online in early 2010. “I can think of no better use of our time and [...]
Wiltshire Heritage Museum library and Google Books
Since the appointment of David Dawson as Director of Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society and Wiltshire Heritage Museum in April 2008, the organisation have not rested on their laurels. The Museum’s library has just gone online via Google Books, and they are possibly the first organisation in the world to do it this way. [...]
Museums as sacred spaces series
I have had in mind for a while to write a series of articles exploring ideas, quite freeform, of museums and galleries as sacred spaces. This concept has interested me for a number of years, since I started working in the sector and remember seeing outside a provincial art gallery a sign which went something [...]
A new home for the Museum of Computing
The UK’s Museum of Computing has secured new premises situated in Swindon’s town centre. Thanks to a 3 year lease donated by Swindon Borough Council, the museum is due to re-open in July. Read more about the Museum of Computing reopening on Culture24 or their own press release for more background on the museum. Friday 23rd [...]
Exhibition reviews on Creative Spaces
I thought about using Past Thinking as the place for exhibition and book reviews on museumy subjects that interest me, but instead I would like to contribute to content creation on Creative Spaces (National Museums Online Learning Project) particularly when the reviews related to items in the nine museum collections it hosts. I have recently [...]
Creative Spaces – some more thoughts
It’s been an interesting day so far on the Museums Computer Group email list. The debate on Creative Spaces has been fast-paced with passion, criticism and defence. I won’t reiterate exactly what has been said, as you could catch up on the threads in the list archive, but I have had some more thoughts that I [...]
Creative Spaces – Social Media and Museums
[Update] I’ve had some more thoughts on Creative Spaces. Feel free to follow this post with my first follow-up. The National Museums Online Learning Project “Creative Spaces” is a social media project that links 9 major UK museums and galleries. Currently in beta, participating institutions include the Natural History Museum, The V&A, British Museum, Tate, National Portrait [...]