OBL4HE: JISC-funded project to digitise museum collections » 2012 » May

Visiting the Grant Museum

rebeccareynolds — Thu, 24 May 2012 11:54:45 +0000

Mark Carnall at the Grant Museum

This week I interviewed Mark Carnall at UCL’s Grant Museum for the museum ethics OER. What he said provides an interesting counterpoint to the interview with Amanda Callaghan at the Cole Museum. Both are zoology museums and have taken different approaches to the question of whether to display animal embryos. Both talk about the different things museums need to consider in making such decisions, such as visitors’ likely responses, the museum’s mission and relevant legislation. Something else that comes across in the interviews is the differences between the museums; for example, the Cole is much smaller, with fewer staff while the Grant has more resources at its disposal.

I have also felt the tecchie fear and done it anyway, in the form of downloading the audio file editing program Audacity and edited the interviews I’ve done so far. I now have bundles of pedagogical material in different media-voice, photo, text,-ready for OERs. Now it needs to be decided how they will be presented to students-on Blackboard? On webpages? I also need to decide how structured they should be, how attractive they need to be, whether it’s more important that they are useful on Reading University courses or adaptable for other courses, and so on.

The Women’s Land Army: fact and fiction

rebeccareynolds — Thu, 17 May 2012 11:02:02 +0000

I’ve been choosing documents for digitisation from the Women’s Land Army (WLA) archive at the Museum of English Rural Life. From the documents it seems that some women looked back fondly on their WLA time even though it was often difficult, since the women were often unused to farm work and sometimes treated badly. They were also volunteers, the main payment being the satisfaction of helping your country. The experience gave rise to tightly-knit social groups, and there were Land Women reunions for decades afterwards. Digitising these documents will support students who sometimes design displays around WLA clothes for Museum studies courses.

By chance I caught a bit of the film ‘the Land Girls’ the day afterwards – strangely, farm work did not figure greatly in the film compared with the ups and downs of romance. I’m glad to see the uniforms were accurate though.

Thinking about web interfaces

rebeccareynolds — Thu, 10 May 2012 10:01:11 +0000

About three quarters of the materials for the ‘cooked’ Reading OERs have now been gathered and we now need to think about how to present them on the web – as a list of links, or as a more structured webpage? Also, how directive should they be? Should they be a fairly loose collection of resources for people to use, or should they be structured to encourage or answer certain questions? My experience is that tutors prefer to adapt materials for their own use in their courses, and the way they have been processed for other courses may not suit them. On the other hand, the resources need to be presented in a way which makes sense and is quickly understandable.