The field of museum geography is taking on new significance as geographers and museum-studies scholars make sense of the spatial relations between the people, things, practices and buildings that make and remake museums. In order to strengthen this spatial interest in museums, this paper makes important connections between recent work in cultural geography and museum studies on love, materiality and the museum effect. This paper marks a departure from the preoccupation with the public spaces of museums to go behind the scenes of the Science Museum in London to explore its rarely visited, but nonetheless lively, small-to-medium-sized object storerooms at Blythe House. Incorporating field diary entries and interview extracts from two research projects based upon the museum storerooms at Blythe House, this paper brings to life the social interactions that take place between museum curators and conservators and the objects they care for. This focus on object-love enables scholars to consider anew what museums are and what they are for, the life of the museum object in the storeroom, and the emotional practices of professional curatorship and conservation. This journey into the storeroom at Blythe House makes explicit how object-love shapes museum space.
This article explores the potential that community-led digital engagement with heritage holds for stimulating active citizenship through taking responsibility for shared cultural heritage and for fostering long-lasting relationships between local community heritage groups and national museums. Through the lens of a pilot project titled Science Museum: Community-in-Residence, we discovered that – despite working with community groups that were already loyal to and enjoyed existing working ties with the Science Museum in London, United Kingdom – this undertaking proved challenging owing to a range of structural and logistical issues even before the application of digital devices and tools had been considered. These challenges notwithstanding, the pilot found that the creation of time and space for face-to-face dialogue and interactions between the Science Museum and the participating community heritage groups helped to establish the parameters within which digital co-curation can effectively occur. This, in turn, informed the development of a digital prototype with huge potential to enable remote, virtual connectivity to, and interactivity with, conversations about shared heritage. The ultimate goal was twofold: (a) to help facilitate collaborative sense-making of our shared past and (b) to aid the building of sustainable institutional and community/public working ties around emerging affinities, agendas and research questions in relation to public history and heritage.
In 1922, the BBC broadcast its first radio programme using a hastily improved transmitter with the call sign 2LO. Over 90 years later, this transmitter was acquired by the Science Museum and moved to its storerooms in Kensington. There is no dispute that this is the same transmitter, an 'icon of broadcasting history', but under closer inspection it was clear that it had also changed in many ways. Through a close encounter with the 2LO transmitter, this article engages with the materiality of museum objects, and particularly heritage technology collections. By taking note of wear and tear, the missing pieces and later alterations, this article considers authenticity and the relationship between meaning and materiality. It also considers the value of museum objects as sources and how material evidence can enrich a historical narrative.
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