Pitt Rivers Museum - University of Oxford

Other grant-funded work continued or was completed during the course of the year.
Three major research projects—those on the Museum’s Tibetan and Southern Sudanese
collections (both funded by the AHRC) and the ESRC-funded ‘Relational Museum’
project—successfully concluded during the year. However, ‘concluded’ is in fact quite the
wrong word, since each project has created a major innovative website, each of which
continues to attract tens of thousands of ‘hits’ from unique virtual visitors. The number of
visitors to the Museum’s main website was also massively up again, this time by 55% to
819,000. This is a real tribute to the work done by David Harris on the research-project
websites and by the Museum’s ICT Officer Haas Ezzet, who also took on the major task of
ensuring that the electronic components of the new extension’s IT, telephone, and security
systems all talk to each other. The Museum’s other two major grant-funded projects—
‘Cutting Edge’ and ‘The Other Within’, on the Museum’s weaponry displays and English
collections respectively—continued to make progress over the course of the year with the aid
of the committed staff who work on and oversee them.
I noted at the outset this had also been a year of great sadness. Tragically, and
unexpectedly, our colleague Hélène La Rue, curator of the Museum’s music collections, died
in July 2007. Hélène had been a member of staff of the Museum since 1980 and a pioneer of
the Museum’s efforts to reach out to families and communities—something that is now
recognized as a core part of the Museum’s activities but was distinctly unusual for a
university museum at the time she originally proposed it. Hélène’s warm, calm, and
sympathetic personality hid both a mischievous sense of humour and an uncomplaining
approach to the demands of her ‘portfolio’ post: she was also curator of the Bate Collection
of Music, and a lecturer in the two University schools of Music and Anthropology, as well as
being a Fellow of St Cross College. The fact that her death occurred in the midst of the
packing of the music collections, for which she was responsible, ready for their move to a
new repository, only added to the sense of untimely loss felt by all her colleagues. Obituaries
appeared in the Independent newspaper and in the Oxford Times, while others are in
preparation, and we are now seeking an appropriate way to remember her within the
Museum. We were no less saddened by the death of Norman Weller—recently caretaker at
the Museum’s research centre at 64 Banbury Road—so cruelly shortly after his retirement in
October 2006.
More cheerfully, and finally, I would like to welcome all new staff, not least Dr Dan
Hicks who joined the Museum right at the close of the year as lecturer-curator in archaeology
in succession to Professor Chris Gosden.
ACCESS
Once again, the Museum’s access team worked at high pressure this year. As mentioned
above, Kate White played a lead role in the preparation of the Museum’s successful bid to the
HLF. She also worked extensively in collaboration with the education team to create a
‘Lifelong Learning and Audience Development Policy, 2006–9’, including action plans for
the next three years, which was submitted as part of the HLF grant application.
Another sizeable project for the access team was the improvement of the Museum’s
orientation and signage, supported by an award (reported last year) from the DCMS/Wolfson
Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund, whose generosity has enabled many capital
improvements to the Museum in recent years. Holmes Wood Consultancy were selected to
design a signage system embracing both the Pitt Rivers and Oxford University Museum of
Natural History (OUMNH). News of the HLF award, along with other significant work now
3