Spring 2012 - Dress and Textile Specialists

Literary and Scientific Institution (BRSLI) lecture programmes. BRSLI is the best venue in Bath for
lectures and building on the existing relationship, we are next year co-convening a series of lectures
on Fashion and Sport, which will coincide with our display of the same name opening in February
2012.
We tweet at least once a day about our day-to-day activities; keeping people up to date on new
donations, objects viewed at the Study Facilities, progress on new exhibitions and store moves as
well as other general fashion-related news and events that we are talking about in the office. We
have deliberately kept the style and tone of our tweets fairly informal in order to give a more
personal and less corporate voice to the Fashion Museum. We feel this helps to foster accessibility
and encourages interested users to find out more about the collections.
Using Twitter is helping us to reach people all around the world. Tweets are publicly visible by
default and in September 2011, Twitter announced that it has 100 million active users logging in at
least once a month and 50 million active users every day. We now have almost 900 followers
including fashion enthusiasts, local residents, museums, designers, bloggers and journalists, all keen
to hear about what’s happening at the Fashion Museum.
Images
The Fashion Museum’s access strategies are all about getting people to see the real thing. We
capitalise on the fact that Bath is a city that people either visit, or would be pleased to visit, and
direct our scant resources to firstly devising and then running different types of access schemes. We
also place emphasis on being open and available so that people can tell us what they need in terms
of access.
Of course, not everybody will come to Bath, so we also concentrate on getting images of objects in
the collection into the public domain. Vivien Hynes, the Fashion Museum Administrator handles all
enquiries about images of our objects, working closely with Bridgeman Art Library. In this way, while
we do not have an on-line catalogue of the collection, we can offer a professional service to
enquirers, and also publish images of our objects on a well-resourced accessible website. Over the
past two years we have also worked with Workman Publishing to publish images of handbags and
shoes in the Fashion Museum collection in their calendar range. Today’s handbag is an 18 th century
pear-shaped, canvas work, purse with large ribbon closure. The 2012 shoe calendar featuring over
100 of our shoes is on sale worldwide right now – surely the perfect Christmas present!
Demand for photographic images is an increasing global phenomenon. Everybody wants pictures,
whether this is a 10 year old working on his school topic, or a journalist working to his two-hour
deadline. By working in partnership with different types of professionals in this area (such as the
Bridgeman Art Library or Workman Publishing), we can increase both access to and levels of
engagement with objects in the collection at the Fashion Museum. And that surely is what the
collecting strategies, the display strategies and the access strategies are all about, enabling as many
people as possible to engage with objects in the museum collection for their own learning,
inspiration and enjoyment.
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‘Talking Textiles’: A Monument Fellowship, York Castle Museum 2010-2011
Mary M Brooks
Introduction
This paper explores the aims, processes and outcomes of the ‘Talking Textile’ Monument Fellowship
which I undertook at York Castle Museum (YCM) in 2010-2011. The ‘Talking Textiles’ Fellowship
18