One Year On: A Move Project Team Update

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Janine Fox, from the Museum’s Move Project Team, gives an update on the MHS Move Project one year after it began.  

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The MHS Move Project commenced just over one year ago and time has flown by! We have packed one out of three collection stores and a third of the second. The Move Project Team has so far audited and packed 17,000 individual items in the collection.

Decorative image. The Museum documentation takes into consideration the difference between the number of ‘items’ and number of ‘objects’. For example, a Compound Microscope, Accessories and Case by J. B. Dancer, Manchester, c. 1860 (inv. 52173), is considered as one object, but it physically comprises over 350 individual items to audit and make safe ready to be moved.

The Move Project Team has grown and we now have six Project Assistants; Annie, Janine, Rose, Martin, Jack and Rowena, and Team Leader Lucy. We also have a number of volunteers that help us with the photography and documentation. Volunteers donate anywhere between 2 hours and 2 days a week to the project and we could not have achieved what we have without their commitment.

The Move Project Team.

The current store room has approximately 20-25,000 items. The Move Project Team are currently working on microscopes, optical instruments, cameras, glass plates and negatives. The current store is quite compact compared to the previous one, so we have had to carefully organise the working space for both computer and practical work. The Project Assistants work in pairs. One Assistant audits the objects whilst the other cleans, prepares and packs the objects. A good radio station and swapping over tasks regularly is a must as inventorying can be very repetitive! However, the opportunity to work with one of the most comprehensive microscope collections in the world means that the Move Team are developing a fantastic breadth of knowledge on  this amazing collection.

Just a small amount of the packing material the team is using.

We require a huge amount of packing materials for so many objects. The basic materials we are using are boxes, corrugated plastic, inert foam and tissue paper. This requires a lot of space and the Move Team have created areas for the storage and cutting of such materials.

The team use these environmental monitors to track the humidity in the store.

It is currently summertime and the stores are a cool relief from some of the warm days we have had this year. The rooms are not air conditioned, but the nature of the building means they stay cool, all we need to do is maintain the relative humidity levels to ensure the collection is not at risk from a fluctuating environment. We use de-humidifiers in the stores to reduce the moisture and have to empty these frequently. We monitor the humidity to ensure we keep the levels within an acceptable band – this usually means between 35 – 65% for a building of this type.

The physical move of the collection is planned for 2018 and we still have a lot of objects in store to audit and pack. We will continue to post updates of the MHS Move Project on Inside MHS. Follow us to see what we get up to. You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter using #mhsmoveteam and #mhsstores.

The Next Generation of Curious Curators

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Helen Pooley is the Primary Education Officer at the Museum of the History of Science. In this guest post she discusses the exciting new cross-museums project Curious Curators. 

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The Museum of the History of Science might seem an obvious place for primary school classes to find out more about topics linked to history and science.  It’s perhaps a less obvious place to do a workshop on literacy skills.  This year, however, I’ve been involved in a project with two local schools which does just that.

Curious Curators is a project funded by the Oxford University Museum Partnership’s Innovation fund.  I have been working with education officers at the three other University of Oxford Museums (the Ashmolean Museum, the Museum of Natural History and the Pitt Rivers Museum) to develop sessions which use museum objects and paintings to build children’s enquiry, research and presentation skills.

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Pupils examine the Museum’s Earth Ball.

Over 120 children from Cutteslowe Primary and West Oxford Primary came to the Museum in their classes for two workshops per class. In their first session, children found out about some of the different roles people have in a museum. They also learnt about how to interact with objects in a Museum setting and were given their own object to research back at school in small groups. Objects included a nineteenth century medicine chest, an Indian earth ball (inv. 51703), a ‘mermaid’s hand’ (manatee bone, inv. 32726) and a moon globe (inv. 52085).

For their second session, the students came back to the Museum to present their research to their classmates and teachers, and museum staff. Even with such a big audience the children were full of confidence when presenting in groups. Many felt they had leant important lessons about team-work.  One student told us that they “learnt that people can express themselves and work together” and that ‘even if you’re not with your friends and think it’s going to go wrong it turns out good!’. The audience also enjoyed quizzing our curators, Stephen and Sophie,  with one piece of feedback saying “I liked asking questions!”. Many of the children have said they were inspired to come back with their families.

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We also had some great feedback from the teachers involved. Tessa Palfreyman, a Year 4 Teacher from West Oxford Primary School said we “based our English work around the project and covered all of our speaking and listening objectives through the group work and presenting. It was fantastic seeing the children present to a group of adults so confidently about something they knew nothing about previously”.

For the education officers, it was a wonderful opportunity for us to collaborate across all four museums. It was also a good way of establishing new links, and strengthening existing ones, with schools. The project has allowed us to invest in resources for school sessions.  Building on the success of Curious Curators, I have now planned a new cross-curricular, literacy based Primary session which will be ready to launch next September.

Hopefully we have inspired a new generation of curators!

Pupils quiz the Museum’s Curator Sophie Waring and Primary Education Officer Helen Pooley.

MHS Inspires Innovative Merchandising

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Lunatic Elegance by Derek Kang on display in the Museum

Lunatic Elegance by Derek Kang

Chris Parkin (Education Officer) talks about the Museum’s new shop project with Banbury College of Art and Design (Oxford Brookes), and the Royal College of Art (RCA).

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Many of our visitors will have noticed the exciting new development that is the MHS shop ingeniously located beneath the old staircase. The shop has begun to stock bespoke merchandise which reflects the beauty and mystery of unique objects in the collection.

Such was the source of inspiration for two groups of creative art and design students from Banbury College of Art and Design (Oxford Brookes), and the Royal College of Art (RCA), who were involved in a project initiated by the Museum’s education department to develop innovative product designs for the Museum’s shop.

After initial research visits to the Museum in which the students were treated to interactive highlight tours, the students were set a brief to develop proposals for new merchandise.

The Museum shop.The students returned in January for a study day in which they were introduced to the Museum’s shop, attended a fascinating lecture on museum retail given by the Ashmolean’s commercial director, Lycia Lobo, and were treated to a tour of the shop at the Old Fire Station.

In March the students braved a Dragon’s Den event, hosted by the Museum, in which they had the opportunity to pitch their product proposals to a daunting panel of five museum professionals including the museum’s director, Dr Silke Ackermann.

What did the students think?

Students had clearly relished the opportunity to develop their own unique lines of enquiry. Chris Massey (RCA) explained how he began by exploring the physical function and light mechanics of a traditional spectroscope, and related those to modern gemstone faceting techniques, the resulting optics of jewellery and finally to branded colours.

“This research has been a perfect bridge to continuing my work in these areas and has helped expand the ways in which I consider our relationship to light, optics and our surroundings today.”

Anthony Wong (RCA) was captivated by the story of John Dee’s Holy Table, his belief in Angels, and quest to communicate with these supernatural entities: “It provoked questions on belief and sparked new ideas, whilst exhibiting gave me the chance to show something of the thought and design process, culminating in a new jewellery collection.”

Rachel (RCA) was stimulated by the sheer diversity of the museum’s collection: “Being able to explore and investigate objects of such historical importance from the Museum’s Collection was an exciting prospect when approaching this project; From pastel drawings and globes to magnifying glasses and sextants, the vast collection meant it was difficult to choose one as a starting point.”

The project’s academic impact.

Louise Williamson, the course lecturer from Banbury College of Art and Design, delighted in the opportunities that her students had been given and the positive outcomes of the project. Indeed, the experience has led her and colleagues to consider the possibility of developing a new module for a course in illustration currently proposed at Oxford Brookes focusing on commercial innovation. The project has led her to think more about how contrasting models of small batch production and mass production can sit together in the retail setting.

Tony Hayward, a lecturer in jewellery design at the RCA commented, “The feedback and questioning from the panel in the final presentation was encouraging; and to exhibit as a culminating show of our work was very useful, and brought the project to a satisfying conclusion,” whilst Louise Williamson, the course lecturer from Banbury College commented, “This is an amazing opportunity for the students and the course.”

Tangram Teasers

The project has been so successful that, following the ‘Dragon’s Den’ style finale, several of the proposals were selected for commercial development including an ingenious Tangram puzzle (Hayley Ash), a unique set of greetings cards featuring unusual objects from the collection (Joanne Woodward), and a collection of high end silver jewellery (Anthony Wong).

Christopher Parkin, Lead Education Officer at the Museum, commented “This has been a very exciting project not only for the students but for all the staff at the museum who have been involved witnessing the extraordinary range and imagination of the students’ work and their response to the collection.”

Over the summer months there will be a changing display of the students’ work in the library cabinets in the basement gallery.

Visitor looking at display

Follow the Students

Royal College of Art

Science to Studio: Exploring the history of science to create new and innovative design
View the students’ project blog here
View the students’ Instagram page here

Banbury and Bicester College

View the students’ Facebook page here
View the students’ Twitter feed here