Dark ages at the Darwin Centre
For blind visitors, the sloping voyage down the egg-shell shaped Darwin Centre at the Natural History Museum is a descent into pervasive barriers. None of the dozens of flat touchscreens have been designed with blind people in mind. Nowhere are tactile models and verbal descriptions to be found.
Neither is there any British Sign Language (BSL) - recognised by the UK parliament as an indigenous language - to be seen. The exclusion of Sign Language from public spaces is, in the first instance, grounded in the failure to recognise deaf people as a linguistic and cultural minority - something scientist Oliver Sacks came to understand 20 years ago and described in his book Seeing Voices.
Lack of funding can be a valid reason. But this is a national museum and a £78m project! The National Waterfront Museum in Swansea and the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, designed BSL in from the outset.
The most popular exhibit at an exhibition for kids at the French Science Museum was a DVD in which a deaf actor explained human reproduction. Sound was the "auxiliary aid" for hearing people. Roles were reversed with success, and inclusion celebrated.
The unusual visual clarity and big print labels and panels at the Darwin Centre are likely to widen accessibility for many partially sighted people. The ever-present subtitles are inclusive of people who are hard of hearing - less though of born deaf people, for whom English is a foreign language at the start.
The voyage into the middle of the Darwin Centre left me bewildered, angry and now pensive. How is it that in the age of anti-discrimination such blatant exclusion is still allowed? It's got much to do with a sloppy approach to legal duties and lack of creative engagement.
Hundreds of millions have been spent over a decade on major new museum and gallery design. Access for deaf people, blind people and people with a learning disability was never a condition for funding. Guidance on accessible technology and exhibition design is badly missing.
If the museums and heritage funding system is ever to deliver real choice and freedom for these groups, a change of gear is required. Inclusive design fuels creativity and, well used, digital technology provides a shared experience.
A percentage of the cost of each major exhibition design should be ringfenced for this. The department for culture has the power - and I believe the duty - to make change happen. Human rights and dignity are at stake.
Marcus Weisen, director, Jodi Mattes Trust for accessible digital culture
The locals like us
Nichola Johnson's review of the Museum of the University of St Andrews is a typical example of the critic's desire to be negative. Having made the point that universities should enable public access to their collections, she then criticises the University of St Andrews for doing exactly this. And as for the design being too text-heavy, no one else has complained.
Reading everything is not compulsory - there are plenty of other things for the visitor to see and do in the galleries and the text has been layered so that visitors can select what level of information they desire. Incidentally, the amount of information available actively encourages repeat visits (so our local visitors tell us).
The reviewer sees the displays as an "apology" for countless treasures being hidden from the public. We make no apology for holding tens of thousands of research specimens (many undisplayable) in storage, though an open-access store for most of our nationally significant collections is also due to open next year.
Disappointing as this review is, we are comforted and much more impressed by the pages of appreciative comments left in the visitors' book by some of the 30,000 visitors that have at last been able to see for the first time (most of) the university's museum treasures and in particular by the 2,400 attendees at schools workshops, weekend and holiday family sessions, community sessions and curator's talks and tours.
Ian Carradice, director of museums, University of St Andrews
Museums Journal November 2009, p48
Sales forecast up
According to the Museums Association's (MA) ongoing survey, as a sector we are increasingly comfortable with the idea of disposing of items from our collections (to complete the survey visit the MA's website).
Having spent a number of years working with the sector to review and update the MA's ethical advice on disposal to make it more acceptable it's pleasing to hear that there is a growing confidence in tackling this issue.
Financially motivated disposal on the other hand, as recent high profile cases have shown, remains hard for the sector to accept. This is of course understandable, but hopefully no museum would consider this course of action unless there were very good reasons to do so, and even then there is no guarantee they will meet the ethical requirements to go ahead.
Whether people agree or disagree with what Southampton or Truro are considering it is important for the sector that we can debate the issues involved as each case will inevitably shape how our attitudes toward financially motivated disposal evolve. Both organisations have been open and transparent about their plans and they should be applauded for that.
It's too early to tell what the outcomes will be for museums currently considering sales; Southampton recently announced that they had put their plans on hold to sell works from their art collection and they are now looking at other options and Truro is beginning a phase of consultation, but it is highly unlikely that they will be the last museums to consider the idea.
The MA and its ethics committee can help museums considering such disposals.
Caitlin Griffiths , head of workforce development and events, Museums Association
Sound reason for guide
While Maev Kennedy's article on plinths and audio guides may have been intended as a light relief from all the doom and gloom of the rest of Museums Journal, it did come across as a bit of an "insider" joke intended just for those who have visited the Moctezuma exhibition at the British Museum and listened to the audio guide.
I presume that her annoyance was prompted by an over-reliance on descriptions of plinths to orientate the visitor to the particular exhibits being discussed but I may well be wrong. As a critique of audio guides it provides very little constructive or even comprehensible criticism.
Elsewhere in the journal, the Museum of the University of St Andrews is criticised for being too much a book on the wall. This is a problem that still dogs the museum curator who wants to get as much information across as possible in a limited space.
Done well, I have found audio guides to be an excellent way around this as the best ones are structured to allow the user to choose the level of detail accessed and can be used in a very flexible way.
Erik Blakeley, curator, Staffordshire Regiment Museum
Museums Journal November 2009, p15
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