Luton Culture | Waulud's Bank Object Box

Touching Objects | Waulud's Bank Object Box 

Waulud's Bank Object Box | Timothy Vickers, Collections Care Officer and school teacher.

Luton Culture recently piloted a user-created object box based on a local archaeological site, Waulud’s Bank. 

This pilot was not formally structured meaning that the end product – the Waulud’s Bank object box, a mini museum that contains real objects from the archaeological site, replica objects and archive material – was not anticipated at the start.

Instead an organic approach was taken; year 9 pupils from a local high school worked as museum consultants to help develop the object-based learning resource.

The box‘s self-facilitation design enables it to be loaned out to schools with the objects being a catalyst for teaching. We’ve found that other users also easily engage with the box, from elderly daycentre patients with dementia to sixth-form students, local archaeology societies and University of the Third Age learners.

Using real archaeological objects in the box wasn’t a problem. Rugged and durable objects were chosen, such as pottery sherds and flint artefacts. Any risks outweighed by the power of touch – to inspire, aid the imagination and create a sense of wonder about a topic that is not always easy to teach using archive material such as photographs and maps.

Above all, the box provides a memorable experience for users of all ages and in an intimate way it helps with engagement to the local area and creates an understanding of a sense of place.

Tips for creating handling boxes:

•    The box the objects come in is as important as the objects themselves if you want people to engage.

•    Life-size replicas can really help. Sometimes seeing what objects would have looked like makes the original fragments more exciting.

•    Ask participants for their observations to ensure they engage with objects, rather than just picking up and putting them down.

•    Facilitators should use the objects to tell a story.

•    Be aware that no two groups will respond in the same way, but that doesn’t immediately mean they are not engaging with the objects and that’s the fun and challenging aspect.

The project was funded by the Museums Association Effective Collections fund. We are now working to disseminate the findings and share knowledge on how to make an effective learning tool for £1,500 (this covers the cost of the box, replicas, graphics and object specialist advice).

For more information on the box please contact Timothy Vickers: timothy.vickers@lutonculture.com / 01582 546722.

Authors | Timothy Vickers, Collections Care Officer at Luton Culture and Julie Reynolds, Freelance Researcher. 

This article was first published by Museum Practice in February 2013.  

Golden Rules | Evaluating Evaluation

Golden Rules | Evaluating Evaluation

I’m quite new to the world of evaluation. When I went part-time at the Museums Association a few years ago, as well as becoming a partner in the Museum Consultancy, one of the people I hooked up with was Christian Heath at King’s College London. We were both surprised that in spite of the millions spent on summative evaluation, it seems to have had a rather limited impact on practice. We wanted to find out why – and we wanted to find out what evaluations could tell museums generally about making engaging visitor experiences.

We devised a project called Evaluating Evaluation and raised some money to do it from two of the main funders of museum evaluation: the Wellcome Trust and the Heritage Lottery Fund. You can read a little more here.

We’ve spent much of 2012 immersed in evaluations, mainly of permanent displays in museums and galleries, with a few from science centres and historic buildings. I soon came across Eric Jensen from Warwick University, a man on a mission running a series of seminars to encourage evaluators to use more rigorous methodologies.

And, at first, I thought that the reasons why evaluations weren’t better shared and compared was because of methodological problems. But, as the Evaluating Evaluation investigation progressed it became clear that even if all evaluations used perfect social science methods they still wouldn’t have a huge impact.

As Nicky Boyd says, there are institutional and organisational issues that prevent evaluation being shared and used to its full extent. Evaluators often come from outside the museum, or have a relatively marginal role inside it, and so do not have a big influence; project teams disperse after completing their work, their knowledge often disperses, too; few museums have proper systems for recording the findings of evaluations and feeding their lessons into future work [although some, such as the British Museum, do]; in the case of summative evaluations of permanent displays, which we focused on, it’s often simply impractical to make remedial changes to a complex gallery.

As our project got started, some evaluators got in touch and told us how dissatisfied they are with the way some museums approach evaluation. They feel museums often prepare lousy briefs, expect far too much for the available fee, have little idea what they are going to do with the evaluation once complete and confuse evaluation with advocacy.

This latter point is crucial. I think summative evaluation can be expected to play four conflicting roles. First is the role we’d all say is the most important: to help the project team learn from their work and improve their future practice.

Second, the similar but subtly different role of supporting learning beyond the project team, or in the wider sector. Here, the fear mentioned by Nicky Boyd comes into play. Project teams can be reluctant to expose their failures – sometimes even within the institution they work for.

Third, most summative evaluation comes at the end of an externally funded project and is a funder’s requirement. There’s a real risk that this confuses evaluation with the funder’s systems for monitoring and accountability. Unless the funder and the museum have a very trusting relationship, it’s likely that the evaluation will be under pressure to ‘prove’ to the funder that the museum met all its objectives.

Finally, in similar vein, some museums don’t want evaluation at all – they just want good news that they can use for advocacy.

I fear that because of the organisational issues, it will be hard for the sector to move to a position where it can realise all the potential benefits from summative evaluation. [I should stress that our focus has been on summative evaluation; the problems seem fewer, and the benefits easier to realise, in the case of front-end and formative evaluation.]

After reading dozens of summative evaluation reports I have to say that my main feeling is one of disappointment that they actually tell us rather little about what visitors actually experience. There’s lots and lots of information in summative evaluations, much of it very interesting, but little of it seems actually that useful beyond the museum that commissioned it – and in some cases it might not in fact be that useful even there.

Sorry to say, if we’re looking for ‘golden rules’ about how to create great museum displays, I don’t think we’ll find them in summative evaluations. [It may be, of course, that the golden rules in fact don’t exist.]

Some evaluators have suggested that museums might move slightly away from summative evaluation towards purer audience research. Perhaps, for example, a group of museums could jointly align all the evaluations they commission to address a consistent set of research questions. Then, over time, comparable data would build up and we might gain some solid empirical evidence about how to better engage our audiences.

Author | Maurice Davies is a visiting senior research fellow in the Department of Management at King’s College London, a partner in the Museum Consultancy and Head of Policy and Communication at the Museums Association  | maurice.davies@ntlworld.com

International Work | Let's Share What We Know

In May 2012, the National Museums Directors’ Council (NMDC) published a short paper, World Collections, which illustrated the breadth and impact of our members’ international work [see image 1]. We wanted to show that working internationally has become business as usual for many museums, and that there is a huge variety and depth of engagement taking place. You might be aware of the high profile loans which attract headlines but there are hundreds of projects beyond those. There are scientists at the Natural History Museum (NHM) working with colleagues across the world to study specimens to learn more about disease-bearing insects. Teams from the British Museum spend weeks in Nigeria and Kenya providing training on how to pin coins, fold textiles and re-build storage facilities. At any time within the walls of UK museums there are worldwide visitors from museums, universities, arts organisations and specialist organisations (like archaeological societies), leading workshops, studying collections, giving lectures, assisting with exhibitions and community programmes and being trained in collections management. Similarly, people from UK museums are visiting colleagues across the world to take part in the same sort of activities.

Some of this I knew already.  Between 2008 and 2011 I was the International Manager at the British Museum and part of my job was to run the World Collections Programme. This was a £3m DCMS-funded project to developing long-term projects in Africa and Asia using six of the UK’s largest collections: the British Museum, British Library, Tate, Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), NHM and the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew.

1. Science Museum re-developed its popular hands-on interactive gallery Launchpad in 2007, the exhibits were donated to the Unizul Science Centre in South Africa. Following the success of the Launchpad Outreach Programme in the UK, the Science Museum entered into a partnership with the Unizul Science Centre.

Image courtesy of NMDC World Collections publication.

At the British Museum I found that getting to know colleagues who were working on similar projects was crucial when working somewhere new or trying to do something particularly tricky. For example, when I was working on negotiating the loan for Afghanistan: Crossroads of the Ancient World I used the network created by the World Collections Programme to make contacts and pick the brains of those who had worked in Afghanistan [see image 2]. I met helpful British Embassy staff and found someone in the Afghan Embassy in London who could help me translate letters into Dari. It was a mutually beneficial group. For quite a while I knew exactly how much it cost for an Iraqi curator to get a UK visa (78 Jordanian dinar), the best flight route from Basra to London (via Amman) ad what to write in a letter to persuade the relevant Iraqi Ministry to let a museum director come to the UK. Unless these were likely to be the answers to my million pound question on Who Wants to be a Millionaire, it was pointless keeping this information to myself. We would co-host visitors with the British Library – Iraqi, Kenyan and Ethiopian scholars and curators who we knew would be interested in each other’s collections. These sorts of experiences have influenced the second aspect of NMDC’s international project: to find ways to better share knowledge and experiences across the museum sector.

2. This object is one of the illicitly traded Begram Ivories which the British Museum helped repatriate to the National Museum of Afghanistan (they very recently have been shipped back to Kabul). 

The picture is "Begram Ivories: Duck Walking to the Left" from Begram, Afghanistan. 

Image courtesy of the National Museum of Afghanistan

International work is, by nature, complicated and any step that can be taken to make it less so is surely a good thing. So, in these straightened times, if a museum wants to develop a partnership in China or apply for EU funding, doesn’t it make sense to talk to someone who has already done it? If a museum spent 18 months being the first UK institution to mount a large touring exhibition to Indian venues (as the V&A has) then they are likely to have learnt a great deal about the most effective ways to negotiate, the best couriers for that environment and where the decent hotels are in Mumbai. Thankfully the V&A are keen to share the answers to these sorts of questions.

Developing international partnerships is no longer the preserve of the very largest London-based cultural institutions. There are hundreds of international partnerships involving museums of all sizes across the UK. For that reason, the V&A and NMDC are organising a session at this year’s Museums Association Conference (Thursday 8^th November, 12.20pm – 13.20pm) to discuss the practicalities of developing partnerships with museums in India. We have participants from the V&A, National Museum of Scotland, the British Library, Indian museums and the British Council, and the focus of the session is on sharing good practice and steering clear of trouble. Given the large Indian community in London, the opportunities for working with Indian museums and the wonderful Indian objects in London museum collections, we really hope it will be helpful to London museums whatever their size.

In the meantime and in the spirit of sharing, I thought I’d finish with a list of five things I learnt – some of it by luck rather than judgement:

• Sustainability - No-one likes to have a project done ‘to them’, so forming long-term partnerships in which you can invest will probably yield the greatest success;
• Do something achievable - Don’t start big – work up to something. Get to know people and how they work with something smaller;
• Ask for advice - The British Council is a great source of in-country guidance and there are many other organisations who work in specific countries or on different art forms and academic subjects. Look up from your project and think who else would be keen to know you are doing this;
• A little tip - Blue is a neutral colour for wrapping diplomatic gifts; books relating to your collection, museum or London make good gifts...
• Shopping - almost every delegation or visit I arranged wanted time off and directions to Primark. I decided this was one part of the trip they could do unaccompanied!

If you have any questions about international work, please see my offer on the Share London website.

Author: Katie Childs, Projects and Policy Officer, NMDC and LMG member.