Museums Health & Wellbeing

Museums Health & Wellbeing

Patients at University College Hospital enjoying an object handling session

Can museums improve your health and wellbeing?

This is a question we have been tackling here at UCL Museums. We’ve been interested in museums’ role in health and wellbeing for a while, so when we were awarded a 3-year research grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council we set about trying to answering the question: what is the therapeutic value of handling museum objects? We focused this research around hospitals and care homes, as traditionally museums have not worked particularly closely with these organisations.

Approach

Our approach has been to work in partnership with a range of collaborators from academics, museum curators, clinicians, hospital patients, care homes residents and their families and carers, applying rigorous methods for assessing the impact of museum encounters on health and wellbeing. We ran over 300 one-one and group object handling sessions in hospitals and care homes and acquired lots of data during the process. Using standardised clinical measures for quality of life, psychological and subjective wellbeing, alongside qualitative analysis of conversations from the handling sessions, we acquired a detailed and nuanced view of the discrete ways in which museums impact individual health and wellbeing.

Results

The results of our research showed highly significant improvements in positive emotion, wellbeing and happiness, improvements in patients’ perceptions of their own health and optimism about the role of museum object handling as a distraction from ward life that impacts positively on relationships among staff, patients and their carers.

A Museum Wellbeing Measure

During the three-year period in which we ran the research we became aware that more and more museums were starting to address the health and wellbeing agenda. So this led to a follow up project where we ran a series of workshops and surveyed lots of museums to find out more about what other museums are doing. This work revealed that not only are there many examples of interesting health and wellbeing projects being run in the UK and elsewhere, but museums are targeting a range of audiences (from older adults through to mental health service users) and using a range of approaches to understand the impact of their work on audience’s health and wellbeing.

That said, there is still a huge amount of work to do to fully understand the impact of our work on individual and community health and wellbeing. To this end we have been working with around 20 different museums to develop a museum-wellbeing measure. The idea is to develop a toolkit, which can be used, re-used, adapted and augmented for use in evaluating the effects of museum encounters on health and wellbeing. Watch this space to find out more…

Impact

Understanding the impact of museums on health and wellbeing has never been more important than at the present time. The radical reforms brought about by the recent Health and Social Care Act, with a focus on prevention rather than cure and greater involvement of the third sector, presents new opportunities as well as challenges for the museum sector. A further challenge for the museums sector is its financial future; given financial constraints and the importance of partnership working we have been exploring the role of volunteers in extending health and wellbeing programmes into community venues such as care homes, day centres as well as hospitals. Funded by the HLF, our Touching Heritage programme is also gathering feedback from the volunteers about the value of their experience to them and their professional development. Find out more at: http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/touching-heritage/.

So what is the answer to the question: ‘Can museums improve your health and wellbeing?’

We think the answer is definitely yes. Evidence suggests that museums can help in lots of ways by: providing positive social experiences leading to reduced social isolation, opportunities for learning and acquiring news skills, providing calming experiences leading to decreased anxiety, increased positive emotions such as optimism, hope and enjoyment, increased self-esteem and a sense of identity, increased inspiration and opportunities for meaning making, providing positive distractions from clinical environments including hospitals and care homes, and  opportunities for increased communication between families, carers and health professionals.

Author | Helen Chatterjee is Deputy Director of UCL Museums and a Senior Lecturer in Biology at University College London. Helen’s forthcoming book Museums, Health and Well-being is due out in Autumn 2013.

Further information about the research discussed is available at: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/research/touch

This blog is the first in a series of three by UCL Museums discussing Museums & Wellbeing, as Helen says watch this space…

Owning up to Authorship

Owning up to Authorship

Museums are full of objects, but they are usually just as full – too full, often – of text.  With a combination of object labels, introductory panels and interactive exhibits, a single display space can feature thousands of words. 

Yet almost all of this writing is anonymous; it is very rare to find any kind of label or exhibition authored by a member of museum staff.  Instead the ‘voice of the museum’ is presented as objective truth.  As those of us who work in museums are well aware, most displays – while they might represent a collective effort on the part of a number of people – are the result of a series of individual decisions. We choose the objects to display, choose where they go and choose what we say about them.  We will almost certainly argue with each other about some of these decisions, but the end result will be presented as a single authoritative selection and voice.  Often, a ‘house style’ is adopted for text, which – while it may well make displays clearer to understand – will also help to paper over differences of opinion or approach.  Even the V&A’s excellent gallery text guidelines,  which encourage museum staff to ‘bring in the human element’ and ‘write as you would speak’, stop short of suggesting that you should say who you are. 

 Added to this, almost all museums have galleries where the displays and interpretation haven’t changed for decades. All the staff know that these displays are out of date, that much of the information in them needs revision, but this will almost certainly not be clear to the public. There is no equivalent to the frontispiece in a book, or the documentary credits, which would tell the visitor who put the thing together and when. 

This reluctance to author displays, to name the people who composed them, seems increasingly old fashioned. Particularly so in a university museum context, where authorship is paramount and where the tradition of academic freedom rests upon the belief that individuals should be free to express their opinions in order that they can be opened up to further debate.  In a world where individual comment is increasingly ‘out there’, in blogs such as this one, and where co-curation with academic or community partners is increasingly common, it is surely time we started owning up to the fact that most museum text is someone’s personal opinion, albeit informed and evidenced in a variety of ways.

The stores and cupboards of UCL museums contain lots of objects with hand-written labels. Most of these date from a pre-computer age when it was only worth typing a label if was going on display. Handwriting personalises the information immediately, and if you work in the museum for any length of time you learn to recognise different individual styles, the traces of former curators, some of them now dead, reminding you of their passions and their personalities.  There are probably all sorts of reasons why a wholesale return to handwritten labels would not be a good idea, but is it worth thinking about how we might, as museum staff, own up to authorship of exhibitions and displays?

Author | Sally Macdonald, Director, Museums and Public Engagement, UCL

First published by UCL Museums and Collections Blog on 04 April 2013.  Image and text copyright UCL.

University Challenge

University Challenge | Exploring university and museum relationships in the Share Academy project

Teaming up to score shared rewards

In the autumn of 2012, Arts Council England funded University College London [UCL], the University of Arts London [UAL], and the London Museums Group [LMG] to investigate how those working in museums and universities could effectively team up in order to reap the rewards of collaborative partnership | Share Academy.  With just six months to find out what kinds of collaborative work was already taking place across the sectors, identify new projects to launch, and provide practical guidance on our findings – we got off to a prompt start.  From the outset the project team were aware of the big issues that affect grassroots work, such as the scarcity of funding across the cultural sector and higher education, the perceived inequalities in status, power and resources between museums and universities, and punishing schedules that make forging new working relationships a luxury rather than common practice.  However, in a climate of funding cuts and demoralisation amongst the arts and culture, pooling resources and expertise seemed not only desirable but vital, and as far as our project was concerned, the opportunity to help bridge the divide between these two different but deeply connected sectors was hugely exciting.

Investigations revealed skill sharing opportunities

A series of investigative focus groups revealed a collective verve amongst museums for generating new collaborations with universities. Participants highlighted the scope of possibilities, ranging from encouraging original research on collections to opportunities for student internships. Specialist conservation techniques, new interpretations of artefacts, and audience-engaging digital technologies were all seen as potential gains from cross-sector partnership. Whilst museums have long been viewed as spaces primarily for school visits, local community groups, and the ‘general public’ we’ve uncovered that in reality museums professionals consider university academics and students as an under-developed audience with interesting potential. Moreover, the museums we spoke with were clear about the distinctive value of their spaces and objects as gateways to new ways of thinking for academia.

Existing cross-fertilisation

Conversations with academics and museum professionals also revealed current trends in collaborative work.  After all, partnership between museums and universities is hardly a new concept. 

Where would an archaeologist be without access to the collections that form the basis of their research?

How would an art historian teach their students without contact with the works of art themselves?

But these were by far the most obvious examples of cross-fertilisation and whilst some fields of university research and teaching were based on the material realities of museum spaces, their unique collections, and professional practices, others certainly were not. But therein lay the challenge!

Teaming up and shared rewards

The Museum of Brands and Packaging

The project kicked off with lots of conversations and then with practical projects, which tested out in real time the opportunities and obstacles inherent in cross-sector collaboration. For example, the UCL QRator project added a new level of interactivity to the Museum of Brands, giving museum visitors the opportunity to use in-house technology to actively engage with questions that are important to the museum, its collections, and wider society [see images above and below]. At the Cinema Museum, postgraduate students from Central Saint Martin’s [UAL] were given the chance to act as consultants to the museum, with the brief to develop ideas that could attract new audiences and improve long-term resilience.

QRator project, Grant Museum of Zoology – Matt Clayton

A third initiative raised important questions about the role of museums both in academic research and in society. A three-year research project lead by academics at UCL had collected and analysed data on over 250 museum object handling sessions in a range of healthcare settings. The findings revealed that object handling increased feelings of positive wellbeing and enhanced communication between patients and carers. To date, no heritage-focused measure of wellbeing exists and the next step was for researchers to try out the wellbeing measures developed in healthcare environments within museums. The Islington Museum and UCL teamed up to carry out this research with the museum’s visitors. In the short term, the museum was keen to see how the sessions worked as part of their diverse programme of events. In the longer term, the research holds potential to clearly demarcate the impact of contact with museums and their collections on feelings of personal wellbeing, which could be a powerful tool for the sector as a whole.

This research project simply could not have taken place without the collaboration of museums and, moreover, the project’s outcomes having tangible results for museums in terms of articulating the positive societal impact of the work that they do.

Lessons Learned

Mismatched expectations

These are just a few examples of what partnerships could bring, but what were the stumbling blocks? Talking to people in museums and universities has clearly shown that practical barriers exist to collaborative work but that there is also great insight into the difficulties and, therefore, scope to resolve them. In general, raising awareness on both sides of the distinct institutional pressures, timescales and working practices would go a long way to overcoming these barriers. We identified that many relationships began in an informal or ad hoc way. Whilst this approach could offer flexibility, it might also lead to mismatched expectations and consequent disappointment. In addition to this, many museums and academics were eager to work on new projects that could push the boundaries of their current practice, but individuals found it difficult to identify suitable partners or have the confidence to approach new contacts with project proposals.

Discovery

To help the two sectors uncover the synergies between them and overcome barriers, Share Academy is developing a series of advice guides on internships, identifying new partners, project planning, and memorandums of understanding for use across the sectors. We identified that whilst academics often have an easily searchable staff page detailing their research interests, individuals working in the museum sector did not. This situation made it more difficult for academics to find the right contacts in museums. To address this issue the project will develop a directory of London museums, which will be hosted on the London Museums Group website, providing a ‘one-stop’ web resource to discover museums and establish new partnerships.

Changing landscape | fruitful connections

So all of this begs the question, can a small project like Share Academy fundamentally change the landscape of collaboration between museums and universities? The short answer is: not immediately. But we can lay the foundations for new and innovative partnerships between the sectors. These foundations will contribute to a strengthening of existing relationships, better mutual understanding of the different priorities and challenges of each sector and, in the longer term, a closer and increasingly fruitful connection between museums and higher education.

If this project has one message, it is | go out there, network, get in contact with potential partners, and pitch your ideas! There is really nothing to lose and a new relationship is only an email away.

As this pilot project completes, we are hosting a symposium and networking event on 10 April 2013 to bring together interested individuals from across London museums and universities to explore the practical potential of forging a closer working relationship. To book a place please click here

Authors | Share Academy Project Managers

Dr Leonie Hannan is a Teaching Fellow in the Museums & Public Engagement department at UCL. Contact: l.hannan@ucl.ac.uk 

Paddy McNulty is Director of Paddy McNulty Associates, a consultancy focusing on museums, heritage, and culture.  Contact: culture@paddymcnulty.co.uk or find out more about his work at www.paddymcnulty.co.uk

More information on the Share Academy click here

This blog is re-published on the UCL Museums and Collections blog space.