Well done everyone involved in Hidden Histories, it looks brilliant and so do the videos!
While I appreciate the summer isn’t the best time to get everyone together, I thought it might be nice to have some museum activity going on that we can all dip in and out of as and when we’re available. One project that lends itself quite nicely to this is a project Becky and I have already begun, on the old History of Education Museum book collection.
The project is quite simple. All the books are (or should be) listed in the inventory of the museum collections. This is an excel spreadsheet, we can work out the logistics of sharing this as we go along. We need to check the books off against this list and then decide if they should go to special collections; library education collection, or Wilderspin museum (a new school museum in Barton-on-Humber). We annotate the inventory list, box them up, and, eventually, after much checking and double checking, off they go.
The nice thing about the project is you get to look through some often beautiful and interesting books, and you get to know other people in the project better as you chat (the work doesn’t take a huge amount of concentration). The bad thing is the collection is huge, and if you’re not careful the enormity of the project can be a bit demoralising. For this reason it would be great if as many of us can get involved as possible, and we don’t set unrealistic goals for completion.
I’m away for a couple of weeks, but if you could all give this some thought hopefully volunteer for a few hours over August that would be great. It works best if we work in pairs, but obviously to begin with me or Becky will need with or form part of every pair, just to explain what we’ve been doing so far, and what needs doing.
Hope all that makes sense. The books, for those of you not sure, are all those boxes currently filling almost every inch of space in the store.
Museum of HSTM 