What did you do at work today?… Updated again!

We’re now nine months into the Sense of Place project, and time is certainly flying by. As we’re getting to know the MERL collections better we’ve been getting involved in wider work within the Museum, on top of our day to day cataloguing work, so I thought it was time for another update on ‘What did you do at work today?’. See here and here for previous posts on this topic.

Enquiries

Over the past few weeks, Felicity and I have been taking on more of the object-based enquiries that MERL receives. These include requests to identify mystery objects, looking to see if we have particular objects in the museum, and handling offers of objects to the Museum. Enquiries really show how useful having a thorough online catalogue is, and what a difference it can make to the day to day work of museum staff. It’s so much easier to answer an enquiry when you can search on the catalogue and know that any information the Museum holds about that object will be there. Unfortunately for us, there are still large chunks of the collection waiting to be catalogued, so you can’t guarantee that searching on Adlib will bring up everything you’re looking for. This means that there’s still quite a lot of rummaging in files to do.

Exhibitions

This Lilliput Lane model was purchased as part of the Collecting Cultures project and was photographed recently for use on an exhibition banner.

We’ve also been getting some experience on putting together a loan exhibition based on the objects collected by MERL as part of the Collecting 20th Century Rural Culture project. Danielle wrote in a previous post about the cataloguing work we’ve been doing on this material, and the differences we’ve noticed in cataloguing context-rich, information heavy recent acquisitions compared with older material with very little or no information in the accession records. It took us nearly two months to catalogue the 350–400 objects. Since finishing the cataloguing we’ve been spending a bit of time identifying objects to be photographed, developing themes for the exhibition, drafting text and choosing images, sorting out copyright issues, and arranging objects to be loaned.

The Berkshire Show

The University of Reading stand at the Berkshire Show

I think by far the most unusual thing we’ve done recently is to dress up as milkmaids and milk a wooden cow at the Royal County of Berkshire Show. The University of Reading had a stand on the theme of dairying and cheese production, with a wide variety of activities for children and adults alike. The Guernsey cow was painted by MERL’s Gallery Assistant, Morryce Maddams, and had a realistic udder mechanism for children to have a go at milking a cow (and many of them were far better than us). There were cheese and yoghurt samples made at the University’s Department of Food and Nutritional Sciences, a cheese-making demonstration, a ‘battle of the bacteria’ activity where children were making plasticine bacteria, an art activity making butter print designs (based on those in the Museum), and a smoothie bike. We had a great day, even if we did feel a bit foolish in the outfit, and to cap it off the stand won two first prizes!

Felicity posing on her milking stool.

Cataloguing

We’re still ploughing our way through the cataloguing, and have reached a total of 7500 enhanced records. Now that we’ve finished the Collecting Cultures cataloguing (2008–2011), we’re finishing 2006–2007 and then going back to 1956 to carry on with the chronological cataloguing. We’re also hoping to make a start in the next few weeks on accessioning some of the material that has come into the Museum over the past few months. So there are plenty of things to keep us occupied, and plenty of variety to keep the project interesting.

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