When it reopens later this year, Cambridge’s University Museum of Zoology will have undergone a metamorphosis almost as dramatic as that of the butterflies in its galleries.
In 2014 the museum was awarded £1.8m by the Heritage Lottery Fund for redevelopment. Among the new features will be accessible storage, a learning centre, and updated displays. Its 21-metre finback whale skeleton will be given pride of place in the entrance foyer, with visitors able to view it from an adjacent glass walkway.
This is part of a broader £60m transformation of the building in which the museum sits, which has been renamed in honour of the broadcaster and naturalist David Attenborough, to become a centre for researching biodiversity. It will also house university researchers and organisations such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the Tropical Biology Association and Fauna and Flora International.
“Being an integral part of a building devoted to biodiversity means that we can show people why our collections are so vital in terms of preserving them for future generations – and make them even more aware of why this is so important,” says Paul Brakefield, the museum’s director.
The continuing depletion of curatorial expertise in natural history across the country makes it more important than ever that museums communicate the subject’s relevance to the public and other stakeholders. Institutions are increasingly experimenting with different ways of using natural history collections to engage visitors with critical issues such as climate change and biodiversity. Working in partnerships and encouraging two-way conversations with visitors are increasingly common techniques used to deepen understanding of the natural world, and embed museum work into wider social and political concerns.
The Cambridge zoology museum will include displays showing how the work of the organisations housed within the building is related. The collection can be used as a reference point to assess the impact of climate change, says Brakefield, and research into biodiversity can inform responsible environmental management.
The museum is involved in research into the impact of oil palm plantations on insect populations in tropical forests. For another project, it is acquiring hundreds of cichlid fish specimens from Lake Malawi, working with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, which carries out genetic research.
“It will tell us what species are there, and that will feed into asking how fisheries in the lake can be better managed, to conserve the full biodiversity,” says Brakefield. “If a museum can involve organisations that are about outreach and real issues that the general public is already interested in, it can only improve its ability to increase awareness around its natural science collection, and how it can be used in innovative and distinctive ways.”
Survival of the fittest
The museum wants to extend its reach beyond the academic community, and is expecting to increase annual visitor numbers by at least a third, to 100,000, within two years of reopening.
“David Attenborough’s name, a brand spanking new building, a nice new cafe with living bees – there are all sorts of reasons why we should become much more attractive to a broader audience,” says Brakefield.
As part of a university, his museum has been relatively sheltered from cuts, but this is not the case for many regional institutions. A survey of 34 UK museums for Museums Journal in 2013 found that the number of specialist natural science curators had declined by 35% over the previous 10 years – more than for many other kinds of collection.
Paolo Viscardi, the chair of the Natural Science Collections Association (Natsca), believes that the situation has since got worse, based on feedback from the subject specialist network’s members. According to an employee at Amgueddfa Cymru (National Museum Wales) the museum has cut its natural science collections staff by 42% since 2013 and is in the process of implementing further cuts.
“Often the problem lies in restructuring posts so that they become broader and cross-collection types, allowing collections care but not enabling the same degree of collections knowledge required for access and effective use of collections,” Viscardi says.
While natural science collections are popular with the public, another frustration is that they are often perceived as being mainly of interest to children. Research commissioned by Natsca in 2013 on museums with mixed collections found that visitors who favoured natural science galleries were more likely to be those who usually came with children, while visitors who preferred to see art were more likely to be those who came alone. One difficulty, Viscardi says, is that people in museum governance positions often have arts backgrounds.
“We constantly have to advocate about our collections to director-level staff – it’s very rare to find someone in that position who has an inherent understanding of their scientific value,” he says.
But despite the challenges they face, some museums are finding creative ways to renew engagement. Derby Museum and Art Gallery has not had a specialist natural science curator for several years, but it has used this loss as a chance to involve visitors closely in designing its new nature gallery, which opened in March 2015.
Andrea Hadley-Johnson, the museum’s co-production and engagement officer, who led the project, says that this is in keeping with the organisation’s wider approach.
“We work with people, rather than deciding what they want and doing it to them,” she says.
A small room became a “project lab”, where questions, objects and images were placed to encourage responses from visitors on Post-it notes and paper. The museum also observed behaviour in the old gallery to identify what stimulated people most, as well as the “cold spots” where there was little engagement.
The range of responses was so diverse that Derby decided to move away from a fixed narrative, to allow people to explore a variety of issues in different ways. A key insight was that people have creative and emotional responses to objects, as well as wanting to understand them intellectually, says Hadley-Johnson.
As a result, the gallery includes a number of playful elements, such as transparent masks containing animal teeth that visitors can place over their own faces. If they post their photos on Twitter using a specific hashtag and handle, they will then be displayed on a screen in the gallery.
And a six-year-old’s beetle drawing has been included in a display alongside real beetle specimens.
Loving the specimens
“It makes people smile – and it’s a potent way for us to say: ‘This collection of beetles is beautiful – why not have a creative response?’” says Hadley-Johnson. “If we engage people in different ways, they grow to love the specimens and feel really invested in them.”
The gallery also includes creative work commissioned by the museum, such as a display by an ethical taxidermist, and a “soundscape” composition that features local sounds.
Observing visitors’ behaviour revealed that less than 5% of people were looking at the text panels in the old gallery, says Hadley-Johnson. So the labels now include only specimen names, with more detailed information provided in booklets.
The museum has found that there are no longer cold spots, says Hadley-Johnson, and that dwell time has increased hugely. The project sourced expertise from academics, local enthusiast groups and non-governmental organisations. But Hadley-Johnson says that the museum feels the loss of a permanent staff member now that its focus has moved on.
“It would be brilliant to have someone who came in a few days a week who could really push and develop what has been set up,” she says.
The museum was careful about how it addressed environmental concerns. In the research phase, some visitors expressed an aversion to being “beaten around the head” on issues such as climate change, says Hadley-Johnson.
“We realised that we would have to engage with some of those issues in a different layer, rather than in the very first layer of information,” she says.
As a result, the museum has introduced initiatives that encourage consideration of these topics once visitors have engaged with the objects themselves. Some volunteers work as “nature ambassadors” who begin discussions in the gallery and encourage visitors to notice nature in their daily lives. And there has been a public vote to choose one specimen as a mascot. A pangolin, an endangered scaly mammal, was chosen, and the museum shop now sells a range of pangolin-themed products, with a share of the revenue going to a pangolin charity.
Evolution not revolution
Communicating the importance of issues without lecturing people is a delicate balance to strike. Henry McGhie, the head of collections and curator of zoology at Manchester Museum, argues that the key is for museums to become less didactic and instead act as a platform that enables people to think for themselves.
Manchester’s recent Climate Control exhibition used the peppered moth – whose populations in Manchester have changed colour over time in response to air pollution levels – as a motif to represent change. The exhibition included a wall with a white side, where people could add black spots representing their carbon footprint, and a black side, where they could add white stickers with their ideas for living more sustainably.
“You could easily fill a huge museum with boring and depressing information about climate change,” says McGhie. “But it’s much more interesting to ask people: ‘What do you think is important?’”
In his view, museums can contribute to civic society by providing a space where people can step back from day-to-day concerns and develop broader perspectives.
“Museums can use their collections to help people understand what the issues are and connect the personal to the local to the global,” he says. “They can help them think about what matters to them, what role they would like to play and what difference they would like to make.”
Building partnerships is central to Manchester Museum’s ambition to act as a bridge between policy and people’s lived experiences. It worked with the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and the steering group that oversees the city’s climate change strategy to develop Climate Control. As part of the programme, experts from these and other organisations came to the museum for conversations with the public.
The role of Manchester Museum is being written into the next version of Manchester’s climate change strategy, which was launched at the museum in December 2016. The institution is already included in the city’s action plans for biodiversity and trees. And it is currently working with other museums in north-west England, alongside other bodies including the Eden Project, the Wildlife Trusts and Age UK, on a project led by the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries at Leicester University, exploring how natural heritage collections can support active ageing.
Spelling out how museums contribute to society can help when making a case to funders. The 7 Million Wonders document, aimed at politicians and other decision-makers in north-west England, explains different ways in which natural history collections can be relevant, such as by increasing wellbeing and helping people understand the impacts of their everyday choices.
McGhie, who played a key role in creating this document, believes that making strong links to broader issues is a responsibility for museums, but also provides a really good opportunity for the sector.
“The natural world is the context in which we all live,” McGhie says. “It’s there on a plate for museums to connect with everyone.”
Jonathan Knott is a freelance writer
In 2014 the museum was awarded £1.8m by the Heritage Lottery Fund for redevelopment. Among the new features will be accessible storage, a learning centre, and updated displays. Its 21-metre finback whale skeleton will be given pride of place in the entrance foyer, with visitors able to view it from an adjacent glass walkway.
This is part of a broader £60m transformation of the building in which the museum sits, which has been renamed in honour of the broadcaster and naturalist David Attenborough, to become a centre for researching biodiversity. It will also house university researchers and organisations such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the Tropical Biology Association and Fauna and Flora International.
“Being an integral part of a building devoted to biodiversity means that we can show people why our collections are so vital in terms of preserving them for future generations – and make them even more aware of why this is so important,” says Paul Brakefield, the museum’s director.
The continuing depletion of curatorial expertise in natural history across the country makes it more important than ever that museums communicate the subject’s relevance to the public and other stakeholders. Institutions are increasingly experimenting with different ways of using natural history collections to engage visitors with critical issues such as climate change and biodiversity. Working in partnerships and encouraging two-way conversations with visitors are increasingly common techniques used to deepen understanding of the natural world, and embed museum work into wider social and political concerns.
The Cambridge zoology museum will include displays showing how the work of the organisations housed within the building is related. The collection can be used as a reference point to assess the impact of climate change, says Brakefield, and research into biodiversity can inform responsible environmental management.
The museum is involved in research into the impact of oil palm plantations on insect populations in tropical forests. For another project, it is acquiring hundreds of cichlid fish specimens from Lake Malawi, working with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, which carries out genetic research.
“It will tell us what species are there, and that will feed into asking how fisheries in the lake can be better managed, to conserve the full biodiversity,” says Brakefield. “If a museum can involve organisations that are about outreach and real issues that the general public is already interested in, it can only improve its ability to increase awareness around its natural science collection, and how it can be used in innovative and distinctive ways.”
Survival of the fittest
The museum wants to extend its reach beyond the academic community, and is expecting to increase annual visitor numbers by at least a third, to 100,000, within two years of reopening.
“David Attenborough’s name, a brand spanking new building, a nice new cafe with living bees – there are all sorts of reasons why we should become much more attractive to a broader audience,” says Brakefield.
As part of a university, his museum has been relatively sheltered from cuts, but this is not the case for many regional institutions. A survey of 34 UK museums for Museums Journal in 2013 found that the number of specialist natural science curators had declined by 35% over the previous 10 years – more than for many other kinds of collection.
Paolo Viscardi, the chair of the Natural Science Collections Association (Natsca), believes that the situation has since got worse, based on feedback from the subject specialist network’s members. According to an employee at Amgueddfa Cymru (National Museum Wales) the museum has cut its natural science collections staff by 42% since 2013 and is in the process of implementing further cuts.
“Often the problem lies in restructuring posts so that they become broader and cross-collection types, allowing collections care but not enabling the same degree of collections knowledge required for access and effective use of collections,” Viscardi says.
While natural science collections are popular with the public, another frustration is that they are often perceived as being mainly of interest to children. Research commissioned by Natsca in 2013 on museums with mixed collections found that visitors who favoured natural science galleries were more likely to be those who usually came with children, while visitors who preferred to see art were more likely to be those who came alone. One difficulty, Viscardi says, is that people in museum governance positions often have arts backgrounds.
“We constantly have to advocate about our collections to director-level staff – it’s very rare to find someone in that position who has an inherent understanding of their scientific value,” he says.
But despite the challenges they face, some museums are finding creative ways to renew engagement. Derby Museum and Art Gallery has not had a specialist natural science curator for several years, but it has used this loss as a chance to involve visitors closely in designing its new nature gallery, which opened in March 2015.
Andrea Hadley-Johnson, the museum’s co-production and engagement officer, who led the project, says that this is in keeping with the organisation’s wider approach.
“We work with people, rather than deciding what they want and doing it to them,” she says.
A small room became a “project lab”, where questions, objects and images were placed to encourage responses from visitors on Post-it notes and paper. The museum also observed behaviour in the old gallery to identify what stimulated people most, as well as the “cold spots” where there was little engagement.
The range of responses was so diverse that Derby decided to move away from a fixed narrative, to allow people to explore a variety of issues in different ways. A key insight was that people have creative and emotional responses to objects, as well as wanting to understand them intellectually, says Hadley-Johnson.
As a result, the gallery includes a number of playful elements, such as transparent masks containing animal teeth that visitors can place over their own faces. If they post their photos on Twitter using a specific hashtag and handle, they will then be displayed on a screen in the gallery.
And a six-year-old’s beetle drawing has been included in a display alongside real beetle specimens.
Loving the specimens
“It makes people smile – and it’s a potent way for us to say: ‘This collection of beetles is beautiful – why not have a creative response?’” says Hadley-Johnson. “If we engage people in different ways, they grow to love the specimens and feel really invested in them.”
The gallery also includes creative work commissioned by the museum, such as a display by an ethical taxidermist, and a “soundscape” composition that features local sounds.
Observing visitors’ behaviour revealed that less than 5% of people were looking at the text panels in the old gallery, says Hadley-Johnson. So the labels now include only specimen names, with more detailed information provided in booklets.
The museum has found that there are no longer cold spots, says Hadley-Johnson, and that dwell time has increased hugely. The project sourced expertise from academics, local enthusiast groups and non-governmental organisations. But Hadley-Johnson says that the museum feels the loss of a permanent staff member now that its focus has moved on.
“It would be brilliant to have someone who came in a few days a week who could really push and develop what has been set up,” she says.
The museum was careful about how it addressed environmental concerns. In the research phase, some visitors expressed an aversion to being “beaten around the head” on issues such as climate change, says Hadley-Johnson.
“We realised that we would have to engage with some of those issues in a different layer, rather than in the very first layer of information,” she says.
As a result, the museum has introduced initiatives that encourage consideration of these topics once visitors have engaged with the objects themselves. Some volunteers work as “nature ambassadors” who begin discussions in the gallery and encourage visitors to notice nature in their daily lives. And there has been a public vote to choose one specimen as a mascot. A pangolin, an endangered scaly mammal, was chosen, and the museum shop now sells a range of pangolin-themed products, with a share of the revenue going to a pangolin charity.
Evolution not revolution
Communicating the importance of issues without lecturing people is a delicate balance to strike. Henry McGhie, the head of collections and curator of zoology at Manchester Museum, argues that the key is for museums to become less didactic and instead act as a platform that enables people to think for themselves.
Manchester’s recent Climate Control exhibition used the peppered moth – whose populations in Manchester have changed colour over time in response to air pollution levels – as a motif to represent change. The exhibition included a wall with a white side, where people could add black spots representing their carbon footprint, and a black side, where they could add white stickers with their ideas for living more sustainably.
“You could easily fill a huge museum with boring and depressing information about climate change,” says McGhie. “But it’s much more interesting to ask people: ‘What do you think is important?’”
In his view, museums can contribute to civic society by providing a space where people can step back from day-to-day concerns and develop broader perspectives.
“Museums can use their collections to help people understand what the issues are and connect the personal to the local to the global,” he says. “They can help them think about what matters to them, what role they would like to play and what difference they would like to make.”
Building partnerships is central to Manchester Museum’s ambition to act as a bridge between policy and people’s lived experiences. It worked with the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and the steering group that oversees the city’s climate change strategy to develop Climate Control. As part of the programme, experts from these and other organisations came to the museum for conversations with the public.
The role of Manchester Museum is being written into the next version of Manchester’s climate change strategy, which was launched at the museum in December 2016. The institution is already included in the city’s action plans for biodiversity and trees. And it is currently working with other museums in north-west England, alongside other bodies including the Eden Project, the Wildlife Trusts and Age UK, on a project led by the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries at Leicester University, exploring how natural heritage collections can support active ageing.
Spelling out how museums contribute to society can help when making a case to funders. The 7 Million Wonders document, aimed at politicians and other decision-makers in north-west England, explains different ways in which natural history collections can be relevant, such as by increasing wellbeing and helping people understand the impacts of their everyday choices.
McGhie, who played a key role in creating this document, believes that making strong links to broader issues is a responsibility for museums, but also provides a really good opportunity for the sector.
“The natural world is the context in which we all live,” McGhie says. “It’s there on a plate for museums to connect with everyone.”
Jonathan Knott is a freelance writer