The Collections Trust's 'Revisiting Collections'
East Lothian Council Museums Service are working with Museums Galleries Scotland and the Collections Trust on a pilot project with three other Museums Galleries Scotland member museums, using the Revisiting Collections Methodology to reveal and record new information about existing collections. An introduction to the UK-wide Revisiting Collections project is available on Collections Link. The pilot is due to finish in April 2010.
What were the aims of the projects
?
To develop the community engagement element of the John Gray Centre’s Museum displays, in particular the Communities display. We we want to be more confident about our display approach by getting reactions from the public to the objects and the topic. It is important to get the views and reaction from communities to ensure the museum accurately reflects their views. We will use the information gathered during this project to develop a display within the 'Communities Section' of the John Gray Centre. We will also use any information gathered to improve the object records on our Collections Database. We believe we will find there are things we have not thought about when documenting and displaying these items before.
What happened?
We chose to focus our display on the community of the Royal Antedilluvian Order of Buffaloes. The RAOB are a friendly society that over the years have met in Musselburgh, Dunbar and Tranent. We planned to hold three focus groups and get reactions from each group to a selection of RAOB objects from our collection. Focus Group One was group of Museum Volunteers. Focus Group Two was a group of students from Prestonlodge High Schools' History Club. Focus Group Three were members of the RAOB Lodge in Tranent.
What will be the final result?
We have managed to gather some amazing information and some challenging questions about the objects. Once we have collated all the information we hope to include some examples on the website. We will be using the questions posed by the focus group participants and the information gathered to create a display. The display will specifically answer the questions that the public most want to know about these objects, rather than displaying them from the Museum's point of view. This display will be changed every two years, and we hope to use the same methodology for all the future displays.
Come back soon to see our results....