Collections Access Assistants

The collections access assistants are funded by Renaissance East Midlands to support work at the partner museums across the East Midlands linked to collections.

They do a variety of work, including documentation, curation, displays and exhibitions and increasing access to collections for a range of groups that museums want to attract to visit.

Over the coming months, a profile of all the different collections access assitants will be added here outlining what they're doing to support their museums.

For more information about Louisa's work, visit the case studies page of the collections section of the Renaissance East Midlands website.

Documenting Leicester

Dean Emery started as a documentation assistant at Leicester City Arts and Museums in September 2004 funded by Renaissance East Midlands.

The role was recruited to help tackle the documentation backlog of tens of thousands of records that need updating and uploading onto the museums service database. Dean got to work on social history records, and has transcribed more than 8,000 some from cards and many from ledgers stored in the city’s museum archives. Ledgers up to 1982 had been scanned in, so were available on computer.

Dean started with social history as Newarke Houses museum, a source of much of the city’s social history collection, was closing for refurbishment and it was a good time to catalogue what the museum held. Through his work, Dean discovered many curious and personal items of interest and found things that were thought lost.

The Leicester Literary and Philosophical Society was involved in the opening of New Walk Museum in the 19th century and Dean found a 17th century brass plate, one of 10,000 items in the Society's collection that founded the museum in 1849. Other interesting items Dean has found include natural history objects, needlework samplers, uniforms and costumes, although there are many more still to be catalogued.

Abbey Pumping Station has been a challenge for Dean and others working there as there hadn’t been any computerised documentation for the past seven years. Dean has been trying to do a day a week and has managed to clear out many of the store rooms, finding plenty of examples of Leicester’s industrial heritage, including a host of Imperial typewriters detailing the company’s link with the city. 

Dean is now one of the best informed museum staff with an overview of a significant part of the city’s collections. He has been able to work with curators to source items for display or suggest items for particular exhibitions or the newly refurbished Newarke Houses museum.

A significant part of Dean’s recent role, supported by a new colleague, Kerem Cetindamar, has been to support the moving of artefacts from old to new stores. The new store is a £3 million initiative that has enabled Leicester Arts and Museums to bring together a wide range of collections, ensure they are effectively looked after and put to best use across the whole museums service. The new store underpins the work to improve Leicester's museums and made possible the refurbishment work at Belgrave Hall, Newarke Houses and New Walk Museum.

The work on the stores has entailed boxing and wrapping the artefacts and transporting them to reinstate at the new store.

In June 2007 Dean’s role changed to become a collections access assistant and in July 2007 he was joined by Kerem Cetindamar. Kerem has a photography background and had been working on Leicester City Council’s online Gimson project and started his new role by ensuring the Gimson items were properly documented.

Since starting the role, Kerem has been getting involved in taking photographs, particularly of paintings and artefacts for documentation and other purposes as well as being a ‘removal man’ alongside Dean in moving items to the new store. Kerem is also putting a brief together regarding the digitisation of collections and is looking to provide information and advice to project teams about how to go about this.

For the future both Dean and Kerem are looking forward to getting involved in more project work to give more people access to more of the city’s collections as well as continuing with the documentation so that Leicester’s museums know what they’ve got and where to find it.

Accessing collections the Leicestershire way

Caroline Lockwood and Alexandra Davy (Alex) joined Renaissance East Midlands in Leicestershire in October 2004 as documentation assistants. They started work on Leicestershire Heritage Services’ documentation backlog, working through by subject area and linked to the Services’ Accreditation plan for its five sites.

Caroline and Alex began work by bringing together existing incomplete records and the objects themselves to develop an excellent record and to examine the objects for any possible damage. It may not sound fun-filled, but it gave Caroline and Alex an excellent overview of Leicestershire’s collections and introduced them to some fascinating objects. They particularly enjoyed the toy collection, finding interesting objects from past and present including historic wooden tip cats and more recent action figures.

Over time, the role developed and they became collections access assistants, a role with more emphasis on how collections can engage members of the public as well as continuing the excellent work in documentation.

The new role reflects both museum and public needs. The documentation work continued in a new way through photographing objects while they were on display in exhibitions. Snibston’s Fashion Gallery with its temporary exhibition space ‘Changing Room’ has been a great beneficiary of their exhibition support work.

They’ve helped to put on a number of exhibitions, creatively using Leicestershire’s collections while engaging new audiences including young people through the ‘Beautiful Game’ football-related exhibition and an exhibition working with Loughborough University fashion students.

Caroline and Alex’s roles have developed so that they now work more closely with curators from the county’s museums to help answer public queries and to suggest items to be used in future exhibitions.

Learning points
The diversity of the new roles that Caroline and Alex play is the basis of their enjoyment and all that they have achieved. They are working with others and benefiting from their expertise and now are passing that on to other museums across the county who they support in all aspects of documentation and exhibitions.

Louisa Selby, Nottingham Museums and Galleries

Louisa Selby came to Nottingham from a museum assistant role at the British Museum, and has found more variety as Nottingham’s collections access assistant where she works across different departments with a variety of roles.
 
Louisa started work in September 2006 and has been working with staff at Brewhouse Yard and other Nottingham City Council Museums and Galleries sites on documentation and collections access work.

Like other collections access assistants, documentation is a key task for Louisa. She is working on ‘reconciliation’ of the acquisition registers with the database records to ensure that the information is correct and up to date. Starting from the 1960s, Louisa and others have made good progress in reaching 1983, but the work continues.

Louisa is also working through files of correspondence from Nottingham Castle over the years. Beginning with the opening of the Castle in 1878, the correspondence includes enquiries about exhibits and information about acquisitions, loans and artefacts which can be added to the database. This is proving useful as Louisa researches a forthcoming exhibition of local artist, Paul Sandby’s, work, much of which has been donated, bequeathed and loaned to the Castle over time. The Castle’s Annual Reports are also being mined for useful information.

From the past to the present, Louisa is helping to update the Nottingham museums pages on the City Council website, including adding searchable collections online. Louisa has got input from all the different museums’ curators and front of house staff suggesting what items should be included initially with the idea of having an option for people to email in their own suggestions for online items. The new pages will be image based but with links to the catalogued information about the artefact.

The museums have a lot of existing images, but Louisa is working with others and developing her photography, Photoshop and scanning skills to get new images for use on the website and on the database records.

Louisa’s background is in coins, but as a collections access assistant she has been finding out about almost all of Nottingham museums’ collections including natural history, costume, fine art and local history.

The new knowledge has helped her develop a number of trails for visitors to Nottingham Castle based on an exhibition of Islamic objects in November 2007.  The objects aren’t just religious artefacts, but also include those made in Muslim countries and give a glimpse of designs seen in objects from around the world. Louisa’s trails, including one with activities for children, have been developed with the support of the Castle’s interpretation officer and guide visitors around different galleries to find the items.

While the documentation is an ongoing task, Louisa’s work, including allocated time each week with each of the keepers of Fine Art at Nottingham Castle, Costume and Textiles and Community History at Brewhouse Yard, is more than enough to keep two collections access assistants busy.  

Documenting Lincolnshire Life

Paul Heath and Luke Skerritt are the Renaissance funded collections officers based at the Museum of Lincolnshire Life in Lincoln since October 2007. The Museum of Lincolnshire Life is the largest and most diverse community museum in Lincolnshire with hundreds of thousands of artefacts, including some of significant national importance like farm wagons and steam engines.

Paul started work in Lincolnshire as a Renaissance East Midlands funded documentation assistant at Gainsborough Old Hall in August 2004 and went a long way to tackle the museum’s documentation backlog, putting card records onto the database. Paul also went into the stores to match items to the records. This process turned up some interesting objects as Paul catalogued a knee high model of a Biblical character slaughtering a sheep. From a distance it looked like a toy, but close up it was far from a child’s plaything. 

Each museum has an internal database for its documentation, but these are accessible to all museum service staff. For example for an exhibition on Lincolnshire Pioneers at The Collection, items from a range of museums were used, found through the databases of documented artefacts.

In April 2006 Paul’s job changed and he became a collections access assistant at Gainsborough Old Hall. Paul’s role began to develop and included taking photographs of the artefacts and helping to select objects for a Victorian education session. The introduction of the photography and the emphasis on making collections accessible has added an extra dimension to the collections access assistants’ day. This built on some of Paul’s previous work at the Film and Video Archive of the Imperial War Museum at Duxford.

In October 2006, Paul moved across to the Museum of Lincolnshire Life to work with fellow collections access assistant Caroline Sleight. When Paul started at Gainsborough only 2,000 of the 10,000 objects were on computer. On leaving there were only 200 objects left to catalogue. The challenge at the Museum of Lincolnshire Life was a little different, with most of the museum’s 250,000 objects, all somehow linked to life in the county, waiting to be recorded. When Caroline arrived in September 2004 the database only held information for 10,000 items, but by September 2007, this was up to 30,000 items.

With so many objects to document, it is difficult to work out where to start, but Paul prioritised on what artefacts are needed for exhibitions. He is very keen to work to get more artefacts on display and give more people better access to aspects of Lincolnshire Life that haven’t been seen in a long time. Paul was involved in a community project to increase access to the collections, ‘Celebrating My Family Collection’. This exhibition was developed in partnership with residents from the Stamp End area of Lincoln, which profiled local family life through objects and oral history.

Derby's collection access assistants

Spencer Bailey started with Derby City Council Museums and Gallery as a documentation assistant in December 2004, tackling the authority’s significant backlog. Initially he added objects to the museum service database, improving the records and enjoying checking the objects to check that they corresponded to the existing description. He also updated the records with where and how the object had been used. The records are also starting to include information from museum visitors who are experts on particular objects and help to inform the museum’s knowledge with specific information. In the future information from exhibition visitor comment books will also be added to the record, to get the fullest picture about objects.

Derby collections access assitants’ documentation work has always been with an eye to improving public access to the collections, through providing accurate information about the objects. For example documentation of an entire Derby chemist shop and its contents, spanning a significant period of time, resulted in the inclusion of some of the artefacts in a health display developed by Spencer’s fellow collections access assistants, Anja Rohde and Jan Gough.

Documentation has sometimes proved a task of investigation as the origin and even original use of some artefacts is unknown, particularly industry or activity specific tools. Occasionally items are put on display with a request for further information about them from visitors, Spencer (and colleagues at Derby Museum and Art Gallery) are quick to recognise that sometimes visitors know more about an exhibit than curators and are delighted to take advice.

The first move away from documentation-only work for Spencer and Anya was an exhibition that followed from documentation of Derby Museum and Art Gallery’s ethnographic collection and inspired a display on food-related items from around the world called ‘Food Stuff’. This incorporated items from the social history, archaeology, ethnography and natural sciences collections. Spencer and Anja took the display from its idea all the way through to the finished item, including selecting artefacts, researching and writing text and arranging the display. It was a popular exhibition and included a booklet containing additional information about the origins and uses of the items.

As a result of the success all Derby’s collections access assistants have been involved in more exhibitions, including assisting other curators to develop a Native Americans exhibition and one on Japan.

Derby’s collection access assistants have also been out of the stores to get involved in handling sessions in and outside the museum, working with others to run two sessions for different community groups about Derby Museum and Gallery’s Linking Landscapes project.  This project seeks to engage community groups with the Museum’s Neolithic and Bronze Age collections, and with the Neolithic and Bronze Age landscapes around Derby. They also supported the Prehistoric Derby Day, a day of events as part of 2007’s Museums and Galleries Month and have taken artefacts out to sheltered housing groups for reminiscence sessions.

The collections access assistant role has developed to include elements of many different things, all underpinned by the documentation, but providing real variety and the chance for staff members to learn and share new skills. The outreach, work on exhibitions, education and research all means that collections access assistants aren’t just recording details about artefacts that will sit in the stores for decades but are a central part of bringing history alive for people – a really great job.

For more information about the work of Spencer, Anja and Jan, visit the collection case studies page on the Renaissance East Midlands website.

Lee Hutchinson, Northampton Museum & Art Gallery

Lee’s role is to give greater access to the town’s collections, especially focusing on attracting the under represented visitor (young people, older people, people of ethnic minority origin, people from poorer areas, disabled people and children) to get involved with the museum on and off site.

This is a huge task and not something to be achieved overnight, so Lee has gone about it in a structured way initially exploring the museum’s stores and catalogue to find out what was available that could attract a new audience. When such things were identified, Lee would ensure that the items were documented and accessible via the museum’s catalogue, including adding digital images where possible. So far, Lee has been surprised to discover just what the museum’s collections contained, including a range of things he was not aware of and has learned about. 

Like the people Lee is trying to attract to the museum, he enjoyed finding items that he wasn’t aware of before, especially through other people’s interest and enthusiasm. For example, through the Street Life project, young people were fascinated by the Samurai armour in the stores and learned about the ethics behind collections of human remains while investigating the archaeological finds at Hunsbury Hill Fort as part of the same project.

The opportunity for Lee has been exceptional; his role is flexible and diverse.  He is involved at the heart of the museum in the essential, but perhaps unglamorous, task of documentation, but at the same time he’s engaging different groups in the museum and developing his project management and partnership working skills.  For Lee the partnerships he’s developed have been both the biggest challenge and greatest learning, but also have provided some of the biggest rewards. Whatever Lee is doing and whoever he is working with, he has realised that imbuing that group with a sense of ownership of the museum, of the collections and of the history and heritage of their town is vital.

Being part of developing collections that are ‘owned’ by the community is what gives him a buzz every time he goes to work.

For more information about Lee’s work visit the Street Life case study at the collections case studies page on the Renaissance East Midlands website.