Behind the scenes

I’ve thought on and off that it would be good to have something like an ‘object of the week’ on the site. But that’s a task I’ll delegate to someone else… before they all run and hide.

Meanwhile, how about a caption competition? I’ve spent some of today putting together an advert to go on the large visitor maps that will be going up round East Lothian shortly. In a small service like this one, you have to do a bit of everything. we don’t have a marketing person (or an admin person, or a finance person, or a human resources person* and so on). One of the pictures I was going to use was this one:

It occurs to me that we have a lot of pictures ripe for captioning (if that is a word). Something like, “…and this afternoon kids, we’re going to the museum!” perhaps?

No prizes, just kudos I’m afraid, but if you have any ideas the comment box is below.

* ‘Personnel person’ seems, well, too, erm, personal IYSWIM.

Our recent adult art classes at Prestongrange were a big success, and they culminated last Friday in an exhibition of the work produced by the participants, few of whom had ever attempted formal art, but were encouraged to do so by the enthusiasm and encouragement of the class tutor, Jacquelyn Rixon.

Working with materials that have a connection with Prestongrange’s past, such as soap, (char)coal, sand and clay, all of the artists produced engaging and relevant work. The results can be seen at Prestongrange Museum until the end of October.

While the adult art class was a pilot project, we hope to continue it in the future. For more details, please contact Jacquelyn Rixon at jacquelyn.rixon@virgin.net

See Europe A La Carte’s blog entry about the classes…

Museums are about things, stuff, objects, artefacts whatever you want to call them. The collections store in Haddington has somewhere in the region of 25,000 objects in it, from the everyday (a griddle pan), to the unusual (a stone anchor), from the beautiful (an Edwardian wedding dress) to the utilitarian (a piece tin). How on earth do we know where everything is? What it comes down to is have you ever thought about what happens when something is given to a museum? It isn’t just a case of find some space on a shelf and leave it there, to be forgotten about and gather dust. Objects are identified, numbered, named (not as simple as you might think – is it a spade or a shovel?), cleaned, measured, stored and recorded on a database. Sometimes there is even the opportunity to do some research on the object. But this all takes time, energy and enthusiasm. We benefit from the help of volunteers like Hazel (pictured) in the store, who has been involved with the Museums for a number of years. Over the next months and years we will be looking for more volunteers in the museum store, so watch this space!

As a postscript to this blog we were shocked and saddened to hear of the sudden death of another invaluable volunteer, archaeologist, keen supporter of East Lothian’s heritage, and friend, Norma Buckingham last week. Norma had helped in the store, with exhibitions, research, opening nights – just about anything. Her glamour, humour and good spirits will be sadly missed.

A belated follow-up to the last posting. The day went well, the audience laughed when I wanted them to, and didn’t laugh when I wasn’t expecting it. I even managed to keep to time, despite having about 55 slides. So job done, and I got to visit the Dulwich Picture Gallery as well on Saturday morning. The fact that owing to part of the Northern Line being closed I missed my train home and had to wait two hours in King’s Cross Station was merely an added bonus.

There were a couple of slightly jarring moments. First when someone from the Tate was talking about a project for which they had been sponsored by BT and mentioned such sponsorship as a way forward for other museums. Errrm, no, not really. Big national institutions may be able to get sponsorship from the likes of British Telecom, but for the rest of us it is neither so easy nor so lucrative. I don’t expect to see major corporate sponsorship of, say, the Inversneckie Teaspoon Museum (© Graham Turnbull). Later, someone else had a flexible attitude as to what constitutes a question. Perhaps making a blatant commercial pitch in the Q&A session is not the best of ideas. Tacking “What do you think?” on the end doesn’t really make it a question, you know.

I was very interested in the digital photography project that the V&A have been running within the museum. People (though I recall that it seemed to be principally aimed at families) were given digital cameras to take round the museum and encouraged to take photographs, which they could then take back to the education centre, download and print. They could also work on the images on a computer (aided by digital artists brought in by the V&A) to create new images which could then be put onto objects such as T-shirts and key-rings. I assume there was a charge for this, but I can’t recall if that was mentioned. The whole project was very staff-intensive and must have been quite expensive, though it wouldn’t be as expensive for us as we wouldn’t have to cope with the number of visitors that the V&A does. It’s a great means of getting people to look at the objects in a different way. One thing I wanted to know was what they did with all then photographs taken by the participants - did they keep them? Certainly no-one got to take away the digital originals as far as I could see, but rather they only got prints (and the other stuff if they had wanted to do that). I’d have thought it would have been nice for people to take away the digital images and put them up on Flickr or on their Bebo or MySpace site. That’s what we will be doing in our John Muir’s Dunbar project - but of course we have no copyright issues with regard to works of art that may be the subject of the photographs.

This Friday I’ll be in London giving one of the presentations at Digital Dialogues (not this one by the way). My title is ‘Repurposing the wheel’, and I’m beginning to wonder if I sound a bit like a stuck record on the subject of making use of the huge range of free (or at least very cheap) applications and services that are now available to everyone (including museums) to make content available and to engage with new and existing audiences. No matter. Many still seem to think that putting anything on the internet must cost huge sums of money, and are either put off by that or happily hand over great wedges of cash, for stuff that really isn’t worth, and shouldn’t cost, that much.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some web projects that will rightly cost a lot of money, but for most of us the major cost (and what in the end really counts for the visitor) is creating the content. The people best-placed to do that are the people who know the collections - the museum’s own staff - and the process of creation therefore has to be easy. We can’t expect all our staff to become web developers. Mind you, we shouldn’t stop them either.

This is what I’ve tried to do with our web sites. I’ve used a simple, free, content management system, Website Baker, for the main sites, and used the free WordPress here for the blog. I’ve made use of Flickr for our images (and as a means of tapping into the existing huge Flickr photo-sharing community) and YouTube for our video (ditto), and other members of the museums service have also been contributing. With a small number of staff in a small service there is no ‘web team’ - we’re all it, and sharing the load is essential (though inevitably some bear a greater share of the burden than others).

There’s no special reason for the picture - I just thought for once I’d include an image - this is from a set taken by participants in a workshop at John Muir’s Birthplace recently. I just rather like it. You can see the others on our Flickr page.

Update: Sigh. It looks like the Museums Association, with scant regard for how the web works or any idea of archiving data, remove events from their web site after they’ve taken place. Not very helpful for anyone wanting to review what’s going on in the sector, is it?

Documenting the collections - what is that exactly? At its simplest it just means recording all the information we have about each object we have in the museums collection. It is this information - from the name and type of the object, its size and the material it’s made from to the stories, the people and the places associated with it - which is essential in undertanding the object; in relating the stories we can tell with it; and in making the connections between our own objects, things elsewhere and the lives and interests of our visitors (both physical and online). Without the documentation the objects are mute - they do not speak for themselves (except to those experts who already carry some of this information around in their heads anyway). So I’m pleased that we have been awarded a grant from the Scottish Museums Council to support the establishment of a Collections Officer post to work on the documentation and conservation of our collections.

But (there’s always a ‘but’) what sort of information is this? It often tends to be technical, and to use obscure professional terms whose meaning would not be obvious to the non-expert. Since we are planning to put our collections information online (and to connect information about collections with the Site and Monuments Record and the records of the East Lothian Archives) the question is: will visitor be able to find stuff that they are looking for, that is in our collections, if they don’t know the terms we have used to describe them? Probably not, unless by complete chance. If that’s the case, what can we do about it?

Yesterday I went to a really interesting presentation yesterday on tagging as a means of facilitating resource discovery (or, in English, helping searchers find stuff). Tagging means adding individual words or short phrases that describe, or relate to the record being tagged. For example, you might tag a photograph of a fishing boat with the tags ‘boat’, ‘photograph’ and ‘fishing’. But you might also use other terms (perhaps the boat’s name, or names of crew or owners, or other terms relating to fishing). In the end you have a list of words and phrases that relate to the photograph. The fun bit for visitors searching for stuff on your site comes when they can search on one of these tags (maybe by clicking on it in a list on screen) and bring up all the other items tagged with the same word or phrase. Searching (and finding) becomes simpler - once you’ve found one item, you can easily find more items of the same sort, or related to the thing you’ve found.

But the really fun thing is when you allow visitors to the site to add their own tags to collection items that they find while searching. This helps future visitors find what they are looking for more easily. It got me thinking about how we might do this for our own collections, both adding in our own tags and allowing visitors to contribute - helping searchers, and helping us to understand how our visitors categorise and think about our collections. It turns the documentation of the collections from an internal professional process into a wide scale ongoing collaborative process. The ‘our’ in ‘our collections’ is no longer just us curators, but expands to potentially include all of us.

So if anyone reading this ends up applying for our Collections Officer post, you now know why you’ve got a little extra job to do…

This will be an unusually short post for me, but it is an important update. After one abortive attempt (with the volunteers of Prestongrange Railway Society present, and pics on Flickr) the volunteers of SRPS have removed the cab and tank (hence the appalling pun) from locomotive number 6 and she is now ready for inspection. There are some photos on the SRPS steam section website up to the time of removal, with more to be added. Unforunately I wasn’t there to see the big reveal, as my contact details had gone astray, however, it is very satisfying to know that we are almost done. Thank you to the volunteers of the SRPS steam section. A more meaty post will follow, but perhaps not for a while as there are lots of other things going on, and I need to tie up the admin of the project to this stage.  

I am running out of bad puns with the word ‘loco’ in to use in the titles of these posts, which is a relief.

This posting is by way of an update about Locomotive number 6, which for the sake of brevity I am now just going to call ‘6′. Towards the end of last year I visited 6 at Bo’ness and Kinneil Railway. She (I think locos are spoken about in the feminine, like ships, but I may be wrong) has been moved inside the sheds and is currently resting in very good company. She is in the same shed as the Morayshire (a working loco that belongs to the National Museums of Scotland) and (more interestingly) Thomas the Tank Engine and his little green buddy Percy. It is enough to make a 3 year old green with envy. Clearly I have spent too much time reading the Thomas stories, as during a tour of the shed I actually knew what a Giesel funnel is, thanks to the story of Peter Sam.

Anyway, 6 is now being worked on. There are a series of tubes that run the full length of the boiler, one end in the firebox (literally where the fire is) and the other at the front of the loco. The plates where the tubes finish look like rusty Swiss cheese. There are pictures of this on Flickr. To get the boiler into a fit state for the boiler inspector to view it all the tubes have to be taken out. To do this the beading (welding) around the edge of the end of each pipe has to be removed and then pressure applied to one end of the tube, which will then come out. Apparently this will be a couple of days work. The tubes are probably going to need to be replaced to get 6 ready to steam again, but this isn’t unexpected. 

Then we got to the exciting bit, which involved wearing overalls and going into the pit underneath the loco and into the firebox! The ash pan (catches the ash from the fire, like a domestic fireplace only bigger) has been taken out and Brian Thompson (one of the directors of the steam section of SRPS, and our contact and guide on this project) took me into the firebox. This was a cube (with no floor) with the tube plate at one side, the cab to the back of us, and the tank (where the water goes) over the top. Unfortunately I managed to leave the lens cap on for this bit, so there is no film (so embarrassed) of this, which is a shame as it was pretty interesting. To be where the fire ought to be in a steam loco was quite an odd experience. These are powerful engines (even 6, which is small by steam loco standards), and there I was with my head in the business end. The firebox was aesthetically quite attractive (in an odd way) with the regular patterns of nuts and tubes, and the reddy brown rust on the metal. It was almost eerie to be inside something that at one time would have been very, very hot and noisy, and is now silent and being examined in almost forensic detail. In some respects this really convinced me that this is the right thing to do (re-steaming). Although the engineering is interesting (and I surprise myself when I type this, as I didn’t think I would be this interested) the engine is effectively dead at the moment, all we can do is imagine it. I don’t think I am anthropomorphosising a lump of metal, but I would like to see her steam again!

I wonder if there is some way we could recreate the experience of working with the locos one day, and not just driving them, perhaps seeing inside the guts of a loco would help us start communicating some of the engineering behind their operation and maintenance. Afterall at a mine like Prestongrange (6 didn’t actually work there, but others did) much of the day to day maintenance of things like steam locos and other equipment would have been done by skilled people on site. There is more to coal mines than simply coal.

The plan from this point is to remove the tubes and continue to strip down the boiler. Then the loco gets taken apart for inspection, and we really need to see that bit (and get it on film). This all needs to be completed by the end of Feb 2007, to enable us to claim the grant from the Scottish Museums Council, without which the work would not have gone ahead. Then, we really need to look at costing the real work - getting 6 steaming again…

So No.6 has gone to Bo’ness. Makes a change from Port Meirion, I suppose.

With apologies for the poor pun, and long posting.

Steam locomotives are evocative reminders of our industrial past. Big, noisy and smelly they have a really wide ranging appeal, my 3 year old loves them, and so does my (nearly) 90 year old Grandad. This appeal is greatly enhanced when they work, or better still you can ride on them. Until 2002 visitors to Prestongrange Museum could do just this on a short section of track, all as a result of the labours of the Prestongrange Railway Society. However, steam locos (never ever call it a train!) need a boiler inspection every 10 years, and invariably need some maintenance as well. This means that the boiler has to be lifted off the base of the loco for a boiler inspector from an insurance company to assess it, and advise on what needs to be done to get the boiler back into some kind of working order. At Prestongrange we lack many of the resources to do this - the equipment (a crane for example), the space, the manpower (we rely on a small long suffering band of dedicated volunteers) and of course money. 2002 saw the certificate on number 6 finally expire, and no steam locos have operated since then.

We know that visitors would like to see a loco operating again, and indeed many would come specifically for this (the figures demonstrate this), but how do we go about it, and should we? Museum curators are the butt of much mockery due to our seemingly odd habits of treating everyday objects with solemn and obsessive care (and our tendencies to wear tweed and corduroy). But this much maligned behaviour is based on common sense. If we treat the objects we are charged with the care of well, then they will be there for future generations to enjoy and learn from.

What has this got to do with steam locos? Well, since number 6 is part of the museum collection, shouldn’t we be wrapping it painstakingly in acid free tissue paper after discreetly numbering it, and then carefully pacing it on a shelf for no-one to touch, see or generally interfere with for the forseeable future, rather than using it and repairing it? No. Museums and curatorship is about much more than just preserving an object. When we choose to take an object into the collection it isn’t just the object we are preserving, it is the web of information, emotion and stories associated with that object too. Things in museum collections were made by, used by, loved, hated, played with and looked after by real people. The collection and interpretation of this information is very important in making these things make sense. In relation to the steam loco, we have lots of hard facts but the machine had a job to do, someone drove it and people maintained it. It would be impossible to recreate the sights, sounds and smells of a huge industrial complex like that at Prestongrange, but by operating a steam loco we can give some impression of the world as it once was, and crucially that impression is one made real by noise, sound, smell and sensation, not just flat text, and is all the more memorable for that.

By working towards the resteaming of number 6 we are focussing on a goal of accessability to the collections, even if in the long term the actual operation of the loco will wear out many of its working parts. This is a common dilemma for industrial curators - at what point do we stop conserving something and start restoring it? If we continually replace, repair and mend a machine does it stop being the object it once was? Very few parts of the Flying Scotsman (if any?) are those that it was originally made with, but that doesn’t stop it being one of the most popular (and iconic) museum exhibits in the country, perhaps in the world. Another aspect we need to consider is how is the work done? Ideally in the same way it would have been done when the loco was in operation - in our case up until the ealry 1980s. This way we go some way towards the preservation and recording of the engineering skills (many of which would die out otherwise) needed to maintain something like this.

So to get back to my story, we decided to apply for some grant aid from the Scottish Museums Council to start the long process of bringing number 6 back up to standard for steaming, and were awarded some money earlier this year.

The actual process of finding somewhere to do the work was laborious, and made even more so by a number of factors, not least that there aren’t many places we could turn to for the job, as it is something of a specialist market. Also in common with other public bodies East Lothian Council has a policy of transparent procurement proceedures for purchases over a certain value whereby a number of comparitive quotes need to be obtained. So this took uo some considerable time. However, in the end we decided to go with the first group we had approached, the Scottish Railway Preservation Society at Bo’ness, who run the Bo’ness and Kinneil Railway. Working with SRPS offers many advantages for us. They are local, they are a heritage orgainisation and (the clincher) they like us, viewed this as a partnership opportunity, with mutual benefits (as a training project for their new volunteers, and as a development opportunity for ELC staff and PRS volunteers). So FINALLY last Thursday things got moving at Prestongrange Museum.

It was a lovely sunny (but very cold) day and various ELC staff and volunteers and a PRS volunteer met a low loader and drivers from Allelys Heavy Haulage at Prestongrange at 8:30am. Getting the loco from the track to the lorry proved to be a challenge (met with gusto by everyone present) and eventually the loco was on its way to Bo’ness to be unloaded. It has been a complex job to get us to this stage, and whilst Thursday was very satisfying personally, as someone who has invested a huge amount of time and energy in this project, I know that there is plenty more to come.

There are some photos on flickr just search for Prestongrange, and there will also be a video on YouTube soon too.