Pitt Rivers Museum - University of Oxford

goodwill towards the two museums amongst the thousands who attended is always
immensely rewarding for the staff who work so hard to make the event a success. Moreover,
our perception that this is so is not entirely subjective. The two museums were jointly
awarded first place in the Museum and Galleries Month commendation scheme, the national
competition that recognizes such events.
On 23 June the Museum contributed to both ‘Opening Doors Opening Minds’ and
‘Architecture Week’ by hosting behind-the-scenes tours of the new extension. The tours
traced the path of a new acquisition, participants learning how an object might be acquired
and its course through conservation, documentation, and photography to eventual display and
use in an education programme.
During the year Kate White submitted a project proposal entitled ‘Behind the Façade’
as part of Oxfordshire County Council’s application to the Arts Council for ‘Oxfordshire
Reflections’ a strand of the year-long celebrations entitled ‘Faces of Oxfordshire 2007’. In
May we learned that the application had been successful, with £8,900 being made available
to Oxford University’s museums. The project will bring together four community groups
with a range of disabilities to work behind the scenes in the University’s museums with
artists brook & black and the Oxford University museums community education officer.
Together they will create pieces for exhibition in the museums in December 2007.
Visitor Figures
Despite the closure of the upper gallery throughout the reporting year, and the closure of the
lower gallery until Easter, the Museum recorded yet another increase in visitor figures for the
year: a 6.7% rise to 196,410. Month-by-month figures paralleled those of 2005–6 until May,
when the extended opening hours—allied to the reopening of the lower gallery—boosted
attendances. The number of visitors to the website also continued to grow (see below).
ICT
Visitors to the main website and associated research projects exceeded 1,000,000 during the
reporting period. Visitor numbers to the main website increased by 55%, to more than
819,000 (2.5 times the figure for 2005–6), while the percentage of visitors who bookmarked
the site was also up by 80% over the period. The Museum’s website continues to expand,
with updates and additions to most of its sections. A major overhaul of the site has
commenced with a view to full implementation in the coming year.
The website component of the AHRC-funded project ‘Recovering the Material and
Visual Cultures of the Southern Sudan: A Museological Resource’ was completed during the
year. This provides public access to the records for, and images of, more than 1,200 objects
and 5,000 historic photographs from the Museum’s collections along with supporting
bibliographical, biographical, and cultural resources and links to relevant literature. By the
end of the reporting year, the site had been accessed by 96,000 unique visitors. In December,
The Tibet Album (a product of the AHRC-funded project ‘Tibet Visual History, 1920–1950’)
also went live, making available a searchable, multi-layered, and interactive ‘living’ resource.
Users are now able to browse images and work with a fully integrated historical baseline
from which they can develop their own albums within the resource. By the end of the
reporting year, the site had attracted more than 50,000 visits. The site won the ‘Ox Talent’
2007 award for innovative use of IT in teaching and learning at the University of Oxford. In
addition, work continued on creating the website output for the ESRC-funded project ‘The
Other Within’, on which project progress reports are already available.
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