Website: National Disability Arts Collection & Archive

This resource tells disabled artists’ stories in their own voice

A £1m grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund has enabled more than 3,000 digital records to be brought together on this site, telling the story of the disability arts movement in the UK.

The initiative, which began in the 1970s, is defined in one document in the collection as “art that is informed by the personal and/or collective experience of the disabled self”. Closely linked to the political campaign for disabled rights, the project aims to allow disabled people to tell their stories in their own voice.

The artists represented in the collection often challenge society’s exclusionary or patronising attitudes towards disability by taking a defiant and darkly humorous stance.
The 2003 image Bored to Death by Steve Jones, for example, depicts a woman in a wheelchair with her head slumped on her hand, evidently unenthused about the prospect of weaving a wicker basket – a comment on the opportunities offered to disabled people.
Meanwhile, a 2014 cartoon by Dave Lupton (pen name Crippen) shows a grave with a “disabled” icon on the headstone. A man carrying an Atos (a firm that assesses claimants’ eligibility for benefits) briefcase says: “Dig him up! He missed his appointment for a work capability assessment!”
As well as artworks, the collection includes photographs, newsletters and other documents, although a significant number of records were not displaying images when I visited the site.

There are also biographies of key activists and artists, such as the singer Alan Holdsworth, known as Johnny Crescendo, who co-organised protests against ITV’s Telethon fundraising campaigns in the 1990s, and coined the slogan “piss on pity”.

The archive is an engaging source of information about the disability arts movement – accessible but with enough depth to support serious research.

Website: 100 Objects North

This site has been created as part of the Great Exhibition of the North to highlight objects from collections across northern England.

Each of the 100 digital records includes an image and text description explaining the object’s relevance and context, as well as an audio description.
Items range from the taxidermied remains of the first Airedale terrier (1887, from Cliffe Castle Museum in West Yorkshire, below) to an original 1971 pressing from Holyground Records, “almost certainly the first independent recording studio and record label in the UK” (Wakefield Museum).
The selection makes a small but effective contribution to regional celebrations.

Website: The Wallace Collection
This image-heavy site provides an attractive portal to discovering London’s Wallace Collection, which recently opened a new £1.2m exhibition space.
The homepage is immediately welcoming, displaying a large pastoral landscape made in 1636 by the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens and minimal text. Scrolling down, you are offered links to information on an exhibition in the new gallery on the venue’s founder, Richard Wallace, as well as the collection.
It is helpful to be provided with details of selected highlights in the collection as well as the opportunity to search objects. The highlights allow visitors to learn more about key items including paintings, a trophy head from what is now Ghana and gold wine cups made for a Chinese emperor. Images can be zoomed and downloaded, although licensing is restricted.
The site also makes good use of video, including an introduction by the institution’s director, Xavier Bray, and a 25-minute tour by the “young curators”, a group of local primary schoolchildren who work with the museum.
This is a good advert for the variety and visual beauty of the Wallace Collection, and what it offers to a range of visitors.