Carol Davies, the curator of Kendal Museum, says that the recent digitisation of key parts of the museum’s collection has transformed the way it works.
“Kendal Museum is a very old museum with truly incredible collections, which are the legacy of the great Victorian collectors who lived in the Lake District. But it’s very difficult to share them with any sense of meaning with the community, unless they can see them and be involved in their care,” she says.
“Digitisation has enabled us to do both of those things, without damage to the collection.”
The museum was awarded a £53,400 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), which enabled it to digitise its herbarium and two mineral collections, producing more than 6,000 high-quality images.
The project took place between September 2014 and August 2015, and the first phase focused on setting up an image preservation studio in the museum and taking the photographs, which can be accessed on a dedicated website. The second phase involved a variety of outreach projects, including a touring exhibition, a photography workshop, and a seed-planting event at a local shopping centre.
The project has increased public access to important collections, which would otherwise have remained off limits.
“The herbarium sheets are too fragile to be exhibited. The mineral collection is not suitable for handling, and some of its objects are not suitable for display, either,” says Davies.
“Advances in technology have enabled me to open up collection areas to the general public that I never thought would be possible,” she adds.
For digitising the herbarium, the museum followed the Metamorfoze guidelines that were developed in the Netherlands and outline how to create an image that has a very close relation to the original object and, therefore, reduces the need for handling.
The HLF funding meant that the museum could create two staff positions for the course of the project, and work with an experienced image consultant.
It also enabled the creation of a permanent imaging studio, which is now being run as a freelance business, providing services to other institutions. “Our main priority is now to work with other museums and share our knowledge,” says Davies.
Davies says that the community impact has been significant. More than 100 volunteers have been involved in the project, working on diverse areas including collection care, gathering data, and outreach work.
“The project has brought incredible people into the museum, both in terms of the people we have employed and also the groups from the community who have been part of it. It has led to a very vibrant and different approach to collection care,” she says.
“Nothing can happen without training, but once they have been trained, volunteers can really be involved at all levels,” says Davies.
“I’m still amazed at how people have really risen to this challenge of doing something extraordinary, in a small museum where a lot of people thought we were punching above our level.”
Students on the museum and gallery skills courses run by the museum, which is a teaching department within Kendal College, have also been involved. “It’s very exciting to have new things that students can look at and help with,” says Davies.
She says that involving the community helps to preserve the collection. “The collections basically belong to the community, so if we share them, people take pride in them, and they know what’s happening. They have a sense of ownership if they get involved in voluntary work.”
A number of other museums employ volunteers on digitisation projects, sometimes on a very large scale. The Natural History Museum (NHM) is aiming to nurture a community of citizen scientists to help it transcribe tens of thousands of specimen labels.
Vincent Smith, the informatics team leader at the NHM, says that transcribing information from labels onto digital records is often a cause of bottlenecks in digitisation workflows. “The real value for science is often in the label information,” adds Smith.
“And it is often hand-written, so you can’t use optical character recognition to extract it. The only way of getting that information is if someone physically reads it and types it in.”
The museum is helping to develop platforms that enable the public to help with this task, including Notes from Nature, which it has worked on with Zooniverse, a large citizen science project. Notes from Nature is particularly geared towards supporting the transcription of natural history museum specimens, says Smith.
“What’s particularly attractive for us is that there’s a technical pipeline that allows us to develop projects and expose them to the public, with all the necessary controls around the data, in a very high through-put way,” he says.
“We get a clear benefit and there is very good evidence that people really enjoy and engage with the activity, too. Our problem at the moment is keeping up the pace of providing material.”
The NHM has trialled using volunteer help for the actual digitisation process, but this is often just as costly, or more so, than the museum doing it in-house or employing professionals, says Smith.
“We are very keen to see more volunteering and citizen science in this area, but it requires a bit more work on our side to figure out precisely how that relationship can be mutually beneficial to all,” he says.
But however volunteers end up contributing, the NHM plans to build public engagement into its future digitisation activities where possible, says Smith.
“The process is quite interesting for members of the public to see, and it also gives us the chance to talk about why we have these collections, and the science we are doing with them,” he says.
“Kendal Museum is a very old museum with truly incredible collections, which are the legacy of the great Victorian collectors who lived in the Lake District. But it’s very difficult to share them with any sense of meaning with the community, unless they can see them and be involved in their care,” she says.
“Digitisation has enabled us to do both of those things, without damage to the collection.”
The museum was awarded a £53,400 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), which enabled it to digitise its herbarium and two mineral collections, producing more than 6,000 high-quality images.
The project took place between September 2014 and August 2015, and the first phase focused on setting up an image preservation studio in the museum and taking the photographs, which can be accessed on a dedicated website. The second phase involved a variety of outreach projects, including a touring exhibition, a photography workshop, and a seed-planting event at a local shopping centre.
The project has increased public access to important collections, which would otherwise have remained off limits.
“The herbarium sheets are too fragile to be exhibited. The mineral collection is not suitable for handling, and some of its objects are not suitable for display, either,” says Davies.
“Advances in technology have enabled me to open up collection areas to the general public that I never thought would be possible,” she adds.
For digitising the herbarium, the museum followed the Metamorfoze guidelines that were developed in the Netherlands and outline how to create an image that has a very close relation to the original object and, therefore, reduces the need for handling.
The HLF funding meant that the museum could create two staff positions for the course of the project, and work with an experienced image consultant.
It also enabled the creation of a permanent imaging studio, which is now being run as a freelance business, providing services to other institutions. “Our main priority is now to work with other museums and share our knowledge,” says Davies.
Davies says that the community impact has been significant. More than 100 volunteers have been involved in the project, working on diverse areas including collection care, gathering data, and outreach work.
“The project has brought incredible people into the museum, both in terms of the people we have employed and also the groups from the community who have been part of it. It has led to a very vibrant and different approach to collection care,” she says.
“Nothing can happen without training, but once they have been trained, volunteers can really be involved at all levels,” says Davies.
“I’m still amazed at how people have really risen to this challenge of doing something extraordinary, in a small museum where a lot of people thought we were punching above our level.”
Students on the museum and gallery skills courses run by the museum, which is a teaching department within Kendal College, have also been involved. “It’s very exciting to have new things that students can look at and help with,” says Davies.
She says that involving the community helps to preserve the collection. “The collections basically belong to the community, so if we share them, people take pride in them, and they know what’s happening. They have a sense of ownership if they get involved in voluntary work.”
A number of other museums employ volunteers on digitisation projects, sometimes on a very large scale. The Natural History Museum (NHM) is aiming to nurture a community of citizen scientists to help it transcribe tens of thousands of specimen labels.
Vincent Smith, the informatics team leader at the NHM, says that transcribing information from labels onto digital records is often a cause of bottlenecks in digitisation workflows. “The real value for science is often in the label information,” adds Smith.
“And it is often hand-written, so you can’t use optical character recognition to extract it. The only way of getting that information is if someone physically reads it and types it in.”
The museum is helping to develop platforms that enable the public to help with this task, including Notes from Nature, which it has worked on with Zooniverse, a large citizen science project. Notes from Nature is particularly geared towards supporting the transcription of natural history museum specimens, says Smith.
“What’s particularly attractive for us is that there’s a technical pipeline that allows us to develop projects and expose them to the public, with all the necessary controls around the data, in a very high through-put way,” he says.
“We get a clear benefit and there is very good evidence that people really enjoy and engage with the activity, too. Our problem at the moment is keeping up the pace of providing material.”
The NHM has trialled using volunteer help for the actual digitisation process, but this is often just as costly, or more so, than the museum doing it in-house or employing professionals, says Smith.
“We are very keen to see more volunteering and citizen science in this area, but it requires a bit more work on our side to figure out precisely how that relationship can be mutually beneficial to all,” he says.
But however volunteers end up contributing, the NHM plans to build public engagement into its future digitisation activities where possible, says Smith.
“The process is quite interesting for members of the public to see, and it also gives us the chance to talk about why we have these collections, and the science we are doing with them,” he says.