Kingston research - Kingston University

20 Collaborations Collaborations
21
Behind the scenes at the
Natural History Museum
Museum staff build up a personal body of information during the course of their
work. Their knowledge of collection development, methodologies, history, exhibitions
and staffing constitute an important cultural resource. Over a period of five years,
24 staff are retiring from the Natural History Museum, taking with them 775 years
of experience. Many of these staff are world leaders in their scientific fields.
Their knowledge is of huge importance to many disciplines yet the Museum
had no sustained programme to capture their knowledge and experience.
The ‘Museum Lives’ collaboration aims to rectify this.
Professor Brian Cathcart, principal investigator,
“Museum Lives”
In a three-year partnership with the
Museum, a team from Kingston
University’s Faculty of Arts and Social
Sciences, led by Professor Brian
Cathcart, is recording the memories and
experiences of curators, collectors and
other specialists. It will produce a detailed
historical record and create multimedia
resources for the Museum’s exhibitions and
education work, which will add new
dimensions to the collections and help
attract fresh audiences.
The project is creating filmed records
relating to 50 Museum staff, as well as short
films suitable for educational and exhibition
use. The resource will be available on the
Museum website and may also be used in
public exhibitions, learning programmes and
marketing. The material will be available to
school and college students, artists,
filmmakers, broadcasters, writers and poets.
The Museum’s Director of Science
Professor Richard Lane said: “Many of our
senior researchers and curators have
decades of experience in managing and
engaging the public with the national
collection of 70 million natural history
specimens. This oral history project gives us
additional tools with which to preserve this
knowledge and share it with a much wider
audience. Visitors and the wider public will
get a new insight into the life and work of
the Natural History Museum in a way they
have never been able to before.”
The long-term aim is to embed the
programme in the Museum’s work so that
preservation of knowledge
becomes routine. Volunteer
oral historians are being
trained, staff will receive help in
recording their memories and
the project will stimulate the
recovery of fading knowledge
through ‘witness seminars’.
‘Museum Lives’ grew out of the
AHRC-funded ‘New Perspectives’ project
which examined ways of encouraging
academics in the arts and humanities to
make better use of the Museum’s
resources. Kingston University’s Faculty of
Arts and Social Sciences and the Faculty of
Health and Social Care Sciences had
undertaken previous research in oral history
methodologies in a project called ‘Nurses’
Voices’ and already had the necessary
expertise.
‘Museum Lives’ is funded by the AHRC
(£262,763). ◆
Giving nurses a voice
urses’ Voices’ captures the history of
‘NSt George’s Hospital in London from
the perspective of its nurses. More than 130
interviews and 1,000 hours of recordings
were generated for the project, featuring
nurses and midwives who trained or worked
at St George’s from around 1930 to the
present day.
The project was run by the Faculty of
Health and Social Care Sciences. By asking
pertinent questions and recording personal
experiences, it captures a richness of
personal experience that cannot be gained
from written records. Interviewees were
asked questions such as: How did it feel to
work in healthcare at the introduction of the
National Health Service? Which clinical
practices were undertaken before the
general availability of antibiotics, in the early
days of cardiac surgery and pacemakers,
and as the brain scanner was being
developed at Atkinson Morley’s Hospital?
What were the people like to work with?
The original team was subsequently
commissioned to work with the Florence
Nightingale Museum to create ‘Hospital
A detail of the skull of Allosaurus, on display at the
Natural History Museum, London
Voices’, an oral history archive of the
memories and experiences of nurses and
patients at London’s Guy’s and St Thomas’
Hospital from 1930. The team have also
worked with the League of St Bartholomew’s
Nurses to create an oral history archive from
which a celebratory DVD of the nurses’
memories has been created. ◆
Photo: © The Natural History Museum, London