Learned friends

The John Player archive had spent many un-loved years in a company depot before, thanks to a new museum-university partnership, it was brought blinking into the light.

Amassed over more than a century at the world-famous tobacco company’s HQ in Nottingham, the archive contains some 20,000 objects and artefacts related to advertising and promotion.

They range from counter cards celebrating smoking in the 1880s, to a shot of entertainers Bruce Forsyth and Frankie Howerd gazing at a pack of fags in the 1960s.

Nottingham’s museums and galleries service is cataloguing the mass of photographs, books, press cuttings, posters, signs and business records from 1877 until the early 1980s as part of a 21-month collaboration with the University of Nottingham.

An exhibition of some the highlights opens at the Museum of Nottingham Life on 18 March and will include a film featuring ex-Player employees and their recollections of working life.

The bulk of the £100,000 funding has come from the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) through the knowledge transfer partnership (KTP) scheme, overseen by the Technology Strategy Board, a quango.

KTPs were created to enable firms to tap into external academic expertise, but Nottingham’s is understood to be one of the first partnerships between a university and its local museum service.

Both sides point to different benefits of working together in a formal partnership. The university, which employs a funding bids specialist, led the way on applying to the AHRC and filling out the complex application, with input from the museum team.

Another boon was having the project researcher, Andy Newnham, based full-time at the museum to catalogue the archive. Though technically employed by the university, he has been a de facto member of the museum team.

And an important legacy of the project will be the avenues it has opened up for further collaborations. The steering group for the project features representatives from departments across the university – including history, social history, business and public health.

“We have built up new relationships,” says Maria Erskine, keeper of community history for Nottingham City Museums and Galleries.

“We are trialling a loans box for the public health department, for example, who look at things like the way health warnings on cigarette packaging have changed over time and how the industry reacted to that and we didn’t even know it existed before. So from what we said we wanted to do originally, we have done so much more.”

Gauging contexts

For the academics, aside from the intrinsic research value of the archive, the project has helped them understand just what it takes to interpret material of this kind in a way that is meaningful to the public as well as scholars.

The university team were surprised to learn, for example, that the cataloguing process would take longer than six months and was likely to run all the way through the project (it’s still not finished).

“The really big issue has been grasping how much contextualisation you have to have for an artefact, how much depth you have to go into,” says Liz Harvey, the head of the University of Nottingham’s school of history.

“There’s an interest in the school of history in the history of consumer culture, as well as social history and local history as academic topics, so of course we are interested in the research potential of an in-depth archive like this.

“We are interested in forging links with the local museum service and have also taken a lot of good ideas from their experience of working with the community and how one might use artefacts and images for educational value,” concludes Harvey.

Collaborations don’t necessarily have to be programme or project-focused. Newcastle’s Discovery Museum, part of Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums, is involved in collaborative PhDs with two of its local universities in which postgraduates use the museum collections for their academic research. This will also be of practical use to the museum.

A longstanding relationship with the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies (ICCH) at Newcastle University led to a first PhD on museum memories online, looking at how the web is transforming museums’ relationship with oral history. It included an examination of Memorynet, a collection exploring the lives of communities linked with the sea in north-east England.

Clear outcomes

Another partnership with Durham University is looking at museums as contact zones and how museums provide a meeting place for people across different cultures and generations.

It is essential for the museum to be involved in devising the research questions if what emerges is to be of real value to the institution, says Hazel Edwards, the manager at the Discovery Museum.

It can take several years to complete a PhD, which is something museums need to factor in, Edwards adds. “You need to set short-term goals, such as an exhibition, and be clear about the outcomes you want.”

Some academics might dig their heels in at being asked to produce a presentation midway through their research, rather than their traditional academic outcomes of a journal article, conference paper or book at its conclusion, says Rachel Pain, a social geographer, who leads the collaborative PhDs for Durham.

“There’s an attitude that you need to have in non-university collaboration and it’s quid pro quo. You have to spend a lot of time doing things that are not going to be beneficial to you in order to keep the collaboration afloat.”

And students increasingly want to work in this way, Pain says. “A PhD is useless unless you are doing something with it and being involved in collaborations is better for them career-wise because they emerge more highly skilled,” says Pain.

Amgueddfa Cymru –National Museum Wales (NMW) has a track record in working with academics. Recent activity has included the geology department’s project work with the Open University (OU) to explore the potential for the application of a “virtual” petrological microscope in a museum gallery.

The microscope was developed to support distance learning for OU earth-science students, but could be used in a museum to introduce visitors to petrology.

Also at NMW, Martin Bell, a specialist in experimental archaeology at Reading University, was brought in to excavate the Moel y Gaer roundhouse, one of three mock iron-age buildings erected at St Fagans open-air museum in Cardiff in the early 1990s. It was created to explore how a real iron-age building would have decayed and in the 20 years since, decay is exactly what is has done. 

“One of the things constantly in our minds is treading the tightrope between research and learning access,” says Adam Gwilt, curator of later prehistory at NMW.
“This project showed that the site could be a learning environment for schools and the public and also have that research value. There is that dynamic of discovering more about the past but also demonstrating some of the processes involved in doing it, which can be just as important.”

NMW has independent research organisation status, which shows its staff have research interests across a number of areas. This allows the museum to be a lead or supporting partner in funding bids and also in shaping projects.

The 2009 report Shared Interest, a joint initiative between North West Universities Association, Renaissance North West and Arts Council England (North West) suggests that collaboration can bring in funding (see box below).

However, Abigail Gilmore, co-author of the report and the director of the Centre for Arts Management and Cultural Policy in Manchester, says that fundraising shouldn’t be the main reason for collaboration.

“What I found was that some of the more successful or less tense collaborations were those that weren’t based on funding, or at least didn’t have it as a primary objective, but were more about the fact that partners had a good fit with each other.” 

And it is the passion of those involved that most often determines whether the project fails or triumphs, Gilmore says: “Despite the clear importance of funding, our interviews suggested that relationships, professionals’ enthusiasm and desire to do it are more important to the successful outcome of a project.”

Julie Nightingale is a freelance journalist

Smoking, Advertising and the History of Consumer Culture conference takes places on 18 May as part of the John Player project.
www.nottingham.ac.uk/history/events/conference18may11.aspx

The 2009 Shared Interest report looked at partnerships between museums, visual arts organisations and universities in the north west of England. The aim of the publication was to show how these sectors can achieve more by working together, and how professionals from each sector can collaborate.

It was commissioned by Renaissance North West, Arts Council England (North West), and the North West Universities Association in order to find out what collaboration was taking place in the region.

The report featured 11 case studies of universities working with museums, such as the Bolton Museum and Archive Service with the University of Bolton, and Dove Cottage and the Wordsworth Museum with the University of Lancaster.

The report concluded that: “Collaboration, partnerships and research relationships between higher education, museums, galleries and visual arts organisations is productive and valuable. The quality and depth of research and knowledge of our culture and heritage can be greatly enhanced by the meeting of professional minds. The beneficiaries are curators, academics, students and artists.”