Aiming higher
University museums are playing a bigger role in the wider cultural sector
University museums and their collections are incredibly diverse, ranging from huge institutions with international reputations such as the Ashmolean in Oxford and the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge, to collections that are rarely seen by the public but are used as a teaching resource, such as the artefacts bequeathed by Victorian scientist Sir Francis Galton to University College London on his death in 1911.
There are more than 100 Accredited university museums in the UK. They are funded by their host universities, with around a third of English university museums receiving further support from the Higher Education Funding Council for England Museum, Galleries and Collections Fund. Nine Scottish universities receive funding from the Scottish Funding Council.
University museums occupy a unique and fortunate position at the interface between the public and academia, but have not always exploited the potential to disseminate their collections and research to wider audiences. With funding squeezes now inevitable for many, they are rethinking their role and responsibilities.
“We are not sanguine and realise that funding streams may change or even dry up in the next 12 months,” says Kate Arnold-Forster, the co-chairwoman of the University Museums Group. “It will be a challenge for us to persuade our institutions to make up any shortfalls or to try and diversify our other income streams. But it’s a complicated picture – we have suffered less than other kinds of public museums and we recognise this.”
Changing culture
There are big changes underway and university museums are not just moving along in the wake of their institutions’ development, in many cases they are leading it.
For example, the University of Manchester’s Whitworth art gallery and Manchester
Museum have delivered major capital projects and ambitious social programmes.
And when University College London (UCL) opens its new campus in east London on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in 2018, it will include a museum.
This will house items from UCL’s vast archaeology, art, natural history, science and medical collections, and present innovative ways of interacting and engaging with university research, both past and present.
“The university culture of innovation, experimentation and analysis enables their museums to act as testbeds for the wider sector, experimenting with new practices and technologies, and promoting public engagement and the impact agenda for research,” Arnold-Forster says.
“Good university museums are closely engaged with academic agendas and are more than showcases. It works both ways. They have to make themselves accessible but also please their university, so it’s a healthy challenge.”
In her role as the director of the Museum of English Rural Life (Merl) at the University of Reading, Arnold-Forster is overseeing a transformation of the institution. She says that the museum is planning to move from a traditional museum of social and technological heritage to one that will engage the public in understanding how the history of the science of food, nutrition, agriculture and animal health is critical to addressing the challenges of sustaining societies into the 21st century.
It will also look at how our cultural ideas of the countryside have emerged over time.
“It’s a significant change – we see it as setting an example that the rural museums sector will look to.
"Our rationale for the redevelopment is based on audience research, and as a university museum we have the distinct advantage of having direct access to the way agricultural policy, research and practice work and how they are changing.
"The university is developing sustainable models to tackle the challenges of food security and the future management of the countryside, issues that we aim to reflect in our new galleries and programmes.”
She adds: “Merl has benefited from about £17m worth of project funding and capital investment over the past decade, which is a significant amount. At the same time, local authority museums have been up against it and it’s only right that we share. We have learnt a lot about working with different communities and hopefully we’ve helped address their deficit in other ways.”
Engaging with the public
The Hunterian Associates Programme at the University of Glasgow is a student engagement initiative where postgraduate researchers use the collections to interact with different audiences.
“The associates have to reach beyond the academic approach and draw in interest groups that wouldn’t normally come into the museum,” says Ruth Fletcher, a student engagement officer at the university. “In this way they apply their research and also have the public engagement output.
“They have to think about who their audiences are, the potential applications of their research areas and how this can transfer to other settings. The Small Change, Big Games project about Roman coins, for example, (see p25) created a lively interaction on both social media and in the gallery.
"Some talks and events were geared towards families, others towards more academic audiences, but they all capitalised on the buzz around the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow last year.”
Newcastle’s Great North Museum: Hancock is unusual in that it is the only university museum in the country, if not the world, to be managed by a local authority museum service. Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums (Twam) runs the venue on behalf of Newcastle University.
“Being part of a wider structure means that we have access to greater resources and expertise,” says Sarah Glynn, the museum’s director.
“Partnership work is woven through the whole structure, from museum fellows disseminating their research to the public, to early years projects such as the V&A Museum of Childhood’s interactive Magic Worlds touring exhibition.
“In a way we are the university’s front door, and the museum benefits further from its location in Newcastle city centre,” Glynn says. “Some of our most popular events have been where the public meet the experts. The key is helping academics to achieve impact.”
Twam also has research partnerships with Northumbria University. “It’s about people feeling comfortable not just in a museum but also on a university campus, and this is why our early years programme is so important – it’s their cultural offer as well,” Glynn says.
The Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture (Moda) at Middlesex University moved in a different direction when it closed its galleries to the public in 2011. The museum then moved to a new site a short walk away from the university’s main campus in Hendon.
It is still open to the public by appointment but the space now consists of a store and a study space where students, researchers and the public can see the collections.
Zoe Hendon, the head of collections at Moda, saw the move as a chance to not only restructure and rebrand, but to rethink the museum’s purpose.
Reinvention for the 21st century
“We focused on being a more effective resource for the university,” she says. “Previously we had tried to spread our resources too thinly by attempting to be both a university resource and a visitor attraction.
“Our communities of interest are not necessarily geographically defined unlike, for example, a local authority museum’s. The museum is obviously here for Middlesex students and staff but beyond that our audiences include people who are interested in the collections for a variety of reasons, but who are geographically widely spread.
"It seemed like a good opportunity to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the web and social media to encourage audiences to engage with and learn from the museum’s collections in ways that would not have been possible a few years ago.”
In addition to its website, Moda also offers touring exhibitions. “Our strapline is ‘Online, on tour and on request’ – making it clear that we are not a virtual museum, as we definitely do still exist in a physical space, albeit an unconventional one,” Hendon says.
And being part of a university has helped the museum meet the challenges it has faced over the past few years because it has been allowed to question what a museum might look like in the 21st century.
“We’re still working it out but that’s OK – it’s a kind of ‘research in practice’,” Hendon says. “It’s helpful to be part of an institution where questioning what you do and why you do it is part of the culture.”
The need to constantly question what you do could apply to the entire university museum sector as it seeks to move forward and engage more deeply with the higher education sector and the public.
Sarah Graham, a PhD Classics student at Glasgow University, and another student used the Hunterian Museum’s Roman coin collections for Small Change, Big Games, a public-facing project as part of the Hunterian Associates Programme.
“The special 50p produced by the Royal Mint to commemorate the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games was a great opportunity to build on the enthusiasm for the games,” she says. “We used this as a springboard for thinking about how games were commemorated on coins in Rome.
“Coins can communicate so much on such a small space. The sense of civic and national identity, depictions of popular sports, and of course the head of the ruler on the obverse are all exactly the same today as thousands of years ago, which is really fascinating.”
Graham says that being active on twitter and social media in the run-up to and during the games got a lot of attention.
“It was great to interact with participants face-to-face as well though, and it was nice to let people hold some of the coins. We also had events for children, including a coin trail and a chance to design their own coin.
“The enthusiasm of the staff and their willingness to support students was a big part of what attracted us to the project,” Graham says. “We loved every minute and gained a lot from taking part, particularly confidence in communicating with a variety of audiences, both academic and non-academic, and in person and online.
“We also gained valuable insights into the way the museum is run and would love to work in museums in future and to maintain links between university departments and museums, which can be so beneficial to everyone involved.”
Digital technology is developing fast and museums can now create accurate visual surrogates of objects for online access.
The costs are beyond the reach of many institutions, however, and this is where university museums such as the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology can step in. University College London’s (UCL) department of civil, environmental and geomatic engineering in partnership with Arius3D, a commercial producer of 3D imaging equipment, teamed up with the Petrie to explore methods of creating accurate 3D replicas of objects.
As a university museum, it was able to draw on expertise from across UCL, including academics and students from the digital humanities and computer science departments, to develop interactive applications using 3D technology.
“We have the experts on hand to support the curators and help us look at 3D from different perspectives,” says Tonya Nelson, the head of museums and collections at UCL. “The Petrie pushed the project a step further to ask: how can 3D images be used to create new engagement opportunities for museum audiences?”
Arts Council England funding was obtained to create a 3D image library, which was launched last year, and the second phase of the website, about the history of collecting in Egypt, past and present, is imminent.
“It allows us to integrate 3D interactivity with stories about the Petrie collection,” Nelson says. “Having 3D objects is not just a novelty or a sideshow; it can provide new pathways for engagement and learning.
Thinking critically about how new digital technologies can be integrated into core operations is a challenge for many museums – many directors don’t want to take it on board.
“While the focus of our work was the Petrie collection, the purpose was to research the possible uses of 3D technology for the benefit of museums generally,” Nelson says.
“We are trying to push 3D technology out into the wider sector. For example, there is a range of low-cost methods of producing 3D images in mobile phone apps and basic SLR cameras.
“We have advised museums, both big and small, on 3D imaging methodologies and have workflows demonstrating how to set up an in-house 3D imaging programme that we share with the sector.”
There will be a number of sessions on the work that museums do with universities at the Museums Association annual conference in Birmingham on 5-6 November.
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance journalist
There are more than 100 Accredited university museums in the UK. They are funded by their host universities, with around a third of English university museums receiving further support from the Higher Education Funding Council for England Museum, Galleries and Collections Fund. Nine Scottish universities receive funding from the Scottish Funding Council.
University museums occupy a unique and fortunate position at the interface between the public and academia, but have not always exploited the potential to disseminate their collections and research to wider audiences. With funding squeezes now inevitable for many, they are rethinking their role and responsibilities.
“We are not sanguine and realise that funding streams may change or even dry up in the next 12 months,” says Kate Arnold-Forster, the co-chairwoman of the University Museums Group. “It will be a challenge for us to persuade our institutions to make up any shortfalls or to try and diversify our other income streams. But it’s a complicated picture – we have suffered less than other kinds of public museums and we recognise this.”
Changing culture
There are big changes underway and university museums are not just moving along in the wake of their institutions’ development, in many cases they are leading it.
For example, the University of Manchester’s Whitworth art gallery and Manchester
Museum have delivered major capital projects and ambitious social programmes.
And when University College London (UCL) opens its new campus in east London on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in 2018, it will include a museum.
This will house items from UCL’s vast archaeology, art, natural history, science and medical collections, and present innovative ways of interacting and engaging with university research, both past and present.
“The university culture of innovation, experimentation and analysis enables their museums to act as testbeds for the wider sector, experimenting with new practices and technologies, and promoting public engagement and the impact agenda for research,” Arnold-Forster says.
“Good university museums are closely engaged with academic agendas and are more than showcases. It works both ways. They have to make themselves accessible but also please their university, so it’s a healthy challenge.”
In her role as the director of the Museum of English Rural Life (Merl) at the University of Reading, Arnold-Forster is overseeing a transformation of the institution. She says that the museum is planning to move from a traditional museum of social and technological heritage to one that will engage the public in understanding how the history of the science of food, nutrition, agriculture and animal health is critical to addressing the challenges of sustaining societies into the 21st century.
It will also look at how our cultural ideas of the countryside have emerged over time.
“It’s a significant change – we see it as setting an example that the rural museums sector will look to.
"Our rationale for the redevelopment is based on audience research, and as a university museum we have the distinct advantage of having direct access to the way agricultural policy, research and practice work and how they are changing.
"The university is developing sustainable models to tackle the challenges of food security and the future management of the countryside, issues that we aim to reflect in our new galleries and programmes.”
She adds: “Merl has benefited from about £17m worth of project funding and capital investment over the past decade, which is a significant amount. At the same time, local authority museums have been up against it and it’s only right that we share. We have learnt a lot about working with different communities and hopefully we’ve helped address their deficit in other ways.”
Engaging with the public
The Hunterian Associates Programme at the University of Glasgow is a student engagement initiative where postgraduate researchers use the collections to interact with different audiences.
“The associates have to reach beyond the academic approach and draw in interest groups that wouldn’t normally come into the museum,” says Ruth Fletcher, a student engagement officer at the university. “In this way they apply their research and also have the public engagement output.
“They have to think about who their audiences are, the potential applications of their research areas and how this can transfer to other settings. The Small Change, Big Games project about Roman coins, for example, (see p25) created a lively interaction on both social media and in the gallery.
"Some talks and events were geared towards families, others towards more academic audiences, but they all capitalised on the buzz around the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow last year.”
Newcastle’s Great North Museum: Hancock is unusual in that it is the only university museum in the country, if not the world, to be managed by a local authority museum service. Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums (Twam) runs the venue on behalf of Newcastle University.
“Being part of a wider structure means that we have access to greater resources and expertise,” says Sarah Glynn, the museum’s director.
“Partnership work is woven through the whole structure, from museum fellows disseminating their research to the public, to early years projects such as the V&A Museum of Childhood’s interactive Magic Worlds touring exhibition.
“In a way we are the university’s front door, and the museum benefits further from its location in Newcastle city centre,” Glynn says. “Some of our most popular events have been where the public meet the experts. The key is helping academics to achieve impact.”
Twam also has research partnerships with Northumbria University. “It’s about people feeling comfortable not just in a museum but also on a university campus, and this is why our early years programme is so important – it’s their cultural offer as well,” Glynn says.
The Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture (Moda) at Middlesex University moved in a different direction when it closed its galleries to the public in 2011. The museum then moved to a new site a short walk away from the university’s main campus in Hendon.
It is still open to the public by appointment but the space now consists of a store and a study space where students, researchers and the public can see the collections.
Zoe Hendon, the head of collections at Moda, saw the move as a chance to not only restructure and rebrand, but to rethink the museum’s purpose.
Reinvention for the 21st century
“We focused on being a more effective resource for the university,” she says. “Previously we had tried to spread our resources too thinly by attempting to be both a university resource and a visitor attraction.
“Our communities of interest are not necessarily geographically defined unlike, for example, a local authority museum’s. The museum is obviously here for Middlesex students and staff but beyond that our audiences include people who are interested in the collections for a variety of reasons, but who are geographically widely spread.
"It seemed like a good opportunity to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the web and social media to encourage audiences to engage with and learn from the museum’s collections in ways that would not have been possible a few years ago.”
In addition to its website, Moda also offers touring exhibitions. “Our strapline is ‘Online, on tour and on request’ – making it clear that we are not a virtual museum, as we definitely do still exist in a physical space, albeit an unconventional one,” Hendon says.
And being part of a university has helped the museum meet the challenges it has faced over the past few years because it has been allowed to question what a museum might look like in the 21st century.
“We’re still working it out but that’s OK – it’s a kind of ‘research in practice’,” Hendon says. “It’s helpful to be part of an institution where questioning what you do and why you do it is part of the culture.”
The need to constantly question what you do could apply to the entire university museum sector as it seeks to move forward and engage more deeply with the higher education sector and the public.
Hunterian Associates Programme: forging crucial links
Sarah Graham, a PhD Classics student at Glasgow University, and another student used the Hunterian Museum’s Roman coin collections for Small Change, Big Games, a public-facing project as part of the Hunterian Associates Programme.
“The special 50p produced by the Royal Mint to commemorate the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games was a great opportunity to build on the enthusiasm for the games,” she says. “We used this as a springboard for thinking about how games were commemorated on coins in Rome.
“Coins can communicate so much on such a small space. The sense of civic and national identity, depictions of popular sports, and of course the head of the ruler on the obverse are all exactly the same today as thousands of years ago, which is really fascinating.”
Graham says that being active on twitter and social media in the run-up to and during the games got a lot of attention.
“It was great to interact with participants face-to-face as well though, and it was nice to let people hold some of the coins. We also had events for children, including a coin trail and a chance to design their own coin.
“The enthusiasm of the staff and their willingness to support students was a big part of what attracted us to the project,” Graham says. “We loved every minute and gained a lot from taking part, particularly confidence in communicating with a variety of audiences, both academic and non-academic, and in person and online.
“We also gained valuable insights into the way the museum is run and would love to work in museums in future and to maintain links between university departments and museums, which can be so beneficial to everyone involved.”
Petrie Museum embraces 3D technology
Digital technology is developing fast and museums can now create accurate visual surrogates of objects for online access.
The costs are beyond the reach of many institutions, however, and this is where university museums such as the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology can step in. University College London’s (UCL) department of civil, environmental and geomatic engineering in partnership with Arius3D, a commercial producer of 3D imaging equipment, teamed up with the Petrie to explore methods of creating accurate 3D replicas of objects.
As a university museum, it was able to draw on expertise from across UCL, including academics and students from the digital humanities and computer science departments, to develop interactive applications using 3D technology.
“We have the experts on hand to support the curators and help us look at 3D from different perspectives,” says Tonya Nelson, the head of museums and collections at UCL. “The Petrie pushed the project a step further to ask: how can 3D images be used to create new engagement opportunities for museum audiences?”
Arts Council England funding was obtained to create a 3D image library, which was launched last year, and the second phase of the website, about the history of collecting in Egypt, past and present, is imminent.
“It allows us to integrate 3D interactivity with stories about the Petrie collection,” Nelson says. “Having 3D objects is not just a novelty or a sideshow; it can provide new pathways for engagement and learning.
Thinking critically about how new digital technologies can be integrated into core operations is a challenge for many museums – many directors don’t want to take it on board.
“While the focus of our work was the Petrie collection, the purpose was to research the possible uses of 3D technology for the benefit of museums generally,” Nelson says.
“We are trying to push 3D technology out into the wider sector. For example, there is a range of low-cost methods of producing 3D images in mobile phone apps and basic SLR cameras.
“We have advised museums, both big and small, on 3D imaging methodologies and have workflows demonstrating how to set up an in-house 3D imaging programme that we share with the sector.”
There will be a number of sessions on the work that museums do with universities at the Museums Association annual conference in Birmingham on 5-6 November.
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance journalist