I have a paper published in a new book called Museum Gallery Interpretation and Material Culture, published by Routledge. The book is an edited version of a conference I spoke at a few years ago with my colleagues David Francis and Claire Edwards from the British Museum. The three of us wrote our paper up into a chapter of the book, which appears alongside other people, including museum interpretation guru George Hein, who we got to share a stage with during a Q&A at the conference – a definite career highlight so far!

Our paper discusses how museums might create an object-centred interpretive approach to interpretation and how that is balanced with a more traditional story-led approach. We had undertaken some research at the British Museum and reported our findings here.

It’s quite a wide-ranging book:

1. Introduction . Juliette Fritsch

Part I: Situating Interpretation in the Museum Context
2. “The Museum as a Social Instrument”: A Democratic Conception of Museum Education. George E. Hein
3. Invoking the Muse: The Purposes and Processes of Communicative Action in Museums. Paulette M. McManus
4. Interpretation and the Art Museum: Between the Familiar and the Unfamiliar. Cheryl Meszaros, eds. Jennifer J Carter, Twyla Gibson

Part II: The Role of Interpretation in Art Galleries
5. Towards Some Cartographic Understandings of Art Interpretation in Museums. Christopher Whitehead
6. Art for Whose Sake? Sue Latimer
7. The Seeing Eye: The Seeing “I”. Sylvia Lahav

8. Part III: How Can We Define the Role of Language in Museum Interpretation?
Juliette Fritsch

Part IV: Interpretation, Personal Experience, and Memory
9. “I loved it dearly”: Recalling Personal Memories of Dress in the Museum. Torunn Kjolberg
10. Welcome to My World: Personal Narrative and Historic House Interpretation. Mariruth Leftwich
11. Narrative Museum, Museum of Voices: Displaying Rural Culture in the Museo Della Mezzadria Senese, Italy. Marzia Minore

Part V: Evidence-Based Practice
12. An Evaluation of Object-Centered Approaches to Interpretation at the British Museum. Steve Slack, David Francis and Claire Edwards
13. The Other Side of the Coin: Audience Consultation and the Interpretation of Numismatic Collections. Effrosyni Nomikou Part VI: Interpretive Strategies for Specific Audiences
14. Designing Effective Interpretation for Contemporary Family Visitors to Art Museums and Galleries: A Reflection of Associated Problems and Issues. Patricia Sterry
15. Interactive Gallery Interpretation for Design Students: Help or Hindrance? Elizabeth Dyson
16. Empower the Audience! How Art Museums Can Become Enriching Creative Spaces for a Wider Audience through Deliberate and Strategic Use of Experience and Learning Theories. Karen Grøn Part VII: Process and People
17. “Reading the Walls”: A Study of Curatorial Expectation and Visitor Perception. Sarah Ganz Blythe and Barbara Palley
18. “Education is a department isn’t it?” Perceptions of Education, Learning and Interpretation in Exhibition Development. Juliette Fritsch

It was presented by the Hunterian Museum, along with the Museums and Galleries History Group (of which I am a recent member) and hosted at the Royal College of Surgeons. There was an emphasis to start with on the history of medical museum. Although collections of specimens in jars used to be very popular, especially in the teaching of anatomy, the Human Tissue Act put an end to many of them and now only a few survive. But they are perhaps on the rise again, given the outstanding quality of displays at the Hunterian.

We also learned about Victorian anatomy shows – plaster and wax models of the body with removable organs – aimed at the general public rather than the medical profession. Again, the 1857 Obscene Publications Act put an end to those and many of the beautiful models were melted down in front of magistrates.

There were papers about Henry Wellcome‘s massive collection of objects (over 1 million when he died in 1936) which took 50 years to sort through and John Ruskin’s lost museum in Sheffield, aimed at inspiring artisans and cratsmen of the city. The museum was disbanded long agao, but has recently been recreated at www.ruskinatwalkley.org , so it’s perhaps not as lost as we think.

Two papers on natural history covered the lost menageries of animals and birds in Regency London and the history of four museums of sconomic botany at Kew Gardens, all of which have now disappeared.

Perhaps the most poignant paper was from Tim Knox, director of Sir John Soane’s Museum, who recounted the collection of medieval art belonging to a contemporary of Soane. The architect Lewis Nockalls Cottingham (what a name!) collected pieces or art and architecture together in his house in Waterloo and opened it up to the public for a fee. Unlike Soane his collection disappeared when, after his death it was sold off by his family – and then the house was demolished in the 20th century to make way for the Festival of Britain.

It’s all a bit sad really – these museums which have been lost forever. But people are still writing and talking about them, so perhaps they aren’t ‘lost’ completey. Their memory lives on in some way.

I was struck by not only the physical void that the ‘loss’ of these museums created, but also the social absence that comes about when a museum closes down. If we celebrate the new Turner Contemporary as a force for good in Margate because it is set to bring about social cohesion in the town, does the closing of a museum remove something from the social fabric of a place? What happened to the visitors who no longer got to see the objects on display have social, intellectual, beautiful experiences?

Hmmmm, I can feel a conference paper of my own coming on …

In the meantime, the exhibition Lost Museums continues at the Hunterian Museum until 2 July.

Most of them put out the same kinds of content – information about events and exhibitions coming up, along with the occasional interesting retweet or information about intriguing objects in their collections. But many of them are delivering rather similar content.

But recently I’ve seen a few institutions being more creative with their tweets – getting objects from the collections to tweet. (To be honest, it looks like this idea has been around for a while and I’ve only just noticed it.)

@NatHistoryWhale is the whale from the ceiling of the Natural History Museum in New York. He (or she?) tweets about American politics and the state of affairs in the arts sector, along with notes about marine conservation.

@SUEtheTrex describes herself thus: “I’m a Leo, I like meat, Chicago, the movie Jurassic Park, and what else? Oh yeah, I’m the world’s greatest apex predator.” She’s the hilarious Tyrannosaurus-Rex at the Field Museum in Chicago who writes haikus for followers and makes jokes about visitors and other museum objects she doesn’t like. And it must be working – she has over 3000 followers!

@William_Kidd was the most infamous pirate to be executed in London. He’s also the subject of a temporary exhibition this summer at the Museum of Docklands, Pirates: The Captain Kidd Story and tweets regular updates about life as a swash-buckling adventurer.

Other favourites of mine include @YuffyMOH, the official twitter feed of the learning team at the Museum of Hartlepool and @EmperorHadrian who updates us all about what’s going on at the various tourist sites along Hadrian’s Wall.

There are many more out there. You can check out more of them on this twitter list or just have a search and see what you can find.

Who – or what – will we see tweeting next?

The Museum generally commissions research about its exhibitions with members of the public in three stages:

Front end evaluation is undertaken when an exhibition is still a germ of an idea, to help the Museum understand if the subject appeals to its key audiences and what people’s existing knowledge of the theme is like.

Formative evaluation takes places once the exhibition is in development and helps to inform or test out the interpretive devices that have been suggested so far. It’s a progress-check with the public that the exhibition is on track.

Summative evaluation is then commissioned when the exhibition is open. This process tests how well the exhibition performed in terms of the objectives set for it, and also informs future exhibition projects.

Evaluation reports from a selection of exhibitions dating from 2006 to 2008 are now online on the BM website. I worked on the interpretive process for a few of these, including Ikebana: living flowers of Japan, Divine Cat: speaking with the gods in Ancient Egypt and Conservation in Focus.

Since leaving the BM a few years ago I now carry out this kind of evaluation, on a smaller scale, for a variety of clients. I work at all three stages of the process, testing ideas before they are put into commission; soliciting responses to exhbitions in development and evaluating exhibitions that have already opened. It’s a fun process, recruiting and conducting focus groups and testing out ideas in face-to-face interviews. If you want to know more about this process, just drop me a line.

But what did the critics make of it?

Tom Sutcliffe, writing in The Independent, thought it was a fun history lesson, but it sounds like the jury is still out for Lucy Mangan in The Guardian, who seems to have warmed to the participants in the programme, but not the concept itself.

Memorable TV likes the concept. Liam Tucker, writing for TV Pixie, thought the show was going to be tedious, but ended up being rather absorbed by the historical commentary.

And, oh dear, the Metro didn’t like it.

So it didn’t get panned, but it didn’t get raved about. I don’t suppose it’s ever going to take on the X-factor in terms of ratings, but to get over 5 million people to watch a social history programme on a Wednesday evening is pretty good going, if you ask me. Let’s hope all of them don’t turn up at the pop-up-shops we’ve built around the country! After a good start in the south west last weekend, the exhibitions are on the road to Clacton and Chatham ready to open on Friday.

This time she chose a couple of papers written in the last year or so which look at approaches to investigating outcomes from a school trip to a zoo. We’ve been playing with ideas about to evaluate how people learn in museum/gallery/zoo/science centres for years now. There have been countless seminars and conferences, books and books written about it, even a research centre established at the University of Leicester and a government-backed model for how to measure learning. But somehow we still can’t get to the bottom of how to figure out the true impact of a museum visit on someone, especially in a learning context.

Perhaps that’s why it’s such an interesting group to be involved with. We always have lively conversations about what we’re doing in the workplace and how the papers we read might impact on that. And it’s a good chance to get together and have a chin wag with other people in the museum learning sector.

This time we read: Learning on Zoo Field Trips: The Interaction of the Agendas and Practices of Students, Teachers and Zoo Educators by Sue Davidson, Cynthia Passmore and David Anderson and Students’ Perspectives of a Science Enrichment Programme: Out-of-school inquiry as access by April Lynn Luehmann.

If you’re working in the museum sector and like meeting people who want to discuss ideas and share contacts/projects, I’m hosting a little event on 6 October in London called Not the Museums Association Conference. It’s for people who can’t afford to go to the MA conference in Manchester this year, but still want to do some networking in a bar, somehwere.

As Stephanie says “Little London Observationist is all about giving other Londoners a voice rather than just plastering personal opinions on every post.”

And so she asked for my opinion as a writer. She asked me about museums, happiness and life in south London, all of which I’m very happy to talk about. The interview is available to read on the Little London Observationist website.

The paper presented on our project focussed on the social nature of our magazine, highlighting how we come together as a group to make the blog. And this, I believe, is the key to the success of the magazine – we are friends in real life and we have created an online social network which reflects that.

The paper Dulwich OnView: an art museum-based virtual community generated by the local community is available to read on the EVA proceedings website.

With thanks to the authors Ingrid Beazley, Jonathan P. Bowen, Alison H.Y. Liu and Sarah McDaid, who have done a great job of celebrating our successes.

That reminds me, I must go and post an article on DOV. I’ve got a great one waiting to go live….

The writer also offers a series of ‘rules’ by which we can be more happy. Take a look at her blog and see what you think.

I’m hoping to be able to interview her for my ongoing research project into the nature of happiness. The aim of the research is to unpick what happiness means to us in a modern context and, given she’s using modern technology of blogging and she’s writing about London now, I think she’d make a great addition. Watch this space to see if I can persuade her to get involved ….