Strokes of serendipity: Community co-curation and engagement with digital heritage

Introduction

Recognizing local heritage as a major asset for enhancing cultural identity, community heritage groups are actively seeking to make effective use of new digital tools and social media platforms to consolidate, publicize and contribute to the interpretation of the rich cultural assets in their locales. However, collections of significant value to local areas are often acquired by national museums that are not always able to make these readily available to the general public as a result of a range of structural factors – facilitating regular access being the most prominent. Shut away in storerooms both local communities and national museums are unable to access the rich aspects of heritage: communities are not able to access locally relevant artefacts and museums are missing out on the personal stories, memories and (local and regional) knowledge that make their collections so meaningful to the general public.

While museums do have a history of ‘inviting’ members of the public to work on exhibitions or specific educational and recreational offers, these are often short term and project driven, meaning that they are designed to achieve a particular objective normally within a very short period of time (Blaser, 2014; Lynch, 2011). In other words, museums approach communities with a subject or agenda already in place and with predetermined terms and time frames of engagement (Hooper-Greenhill, 2000). In a pilot project titled Science Museum: Community-in-Residence, we challenged this model by providing community access to the whole of the Science Museum collection. ¹ Local community members from Ceramic City Stories (Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire) and Bute Island Heritage (Isle of Bute, Scotland) ² toured the stores and selected objects of most interest and relevance to them which they commented upon and used to tell their own stories using blogs and Twitter.

Given that museum curators are increasingly recognizing the potential of digital technologies as a way to protect and encourage access to our shared material heritage via often top-down, designed platforms (Bailey, 2008; Boon, 2011; Wallace, 2009), we investigated the role that community-led digital engagement in the form of smartphone devices, tablets, Twitter, Flickr, Historypin and Facebook could play in improving access to stored collections and the challenges associated with this. The remainder of this article is structured as follows. In the proceeding section, we discuss some of the key conceptual perspectives underlying digital engagement with shared heritage that we find useful in framing our empirical analysis, followed by a detailed description of the context before, during and after Science Museum: Community-in-Residence. We find this fruitful because it provides a sense of how building face-to-face working relationships between local communities and national museums around access and other related practical issues is crucial to engaging with public heritage resources before considering how the perceived affordances of digital technology can be utilized. As such, the analytical discussion that ensues engages first with key offline issues pertaining to access to artefacts and collections more broadly before homing in on the engagement with these using digital tools and resources. Thereafter, we discuss how remote digital connectivity and engagement with memory institutional spaces through the development of a digital modelling prototype specifically tailored to opening up the aforementioned spaces present an invaluable opportunity for community co-curation and enrichment of our shared cultural assets.

Challenging traditional paradigms through broader digital engagement with shared heritage

The significance of national museum collections in preserving artefacts and memories of utmost interest and relevance to local communities in many parts of the globe has been well documented both in industry and in academic circles (Bastian and Alexander, 2009; Crooke, 2007; Keene, 2005; Keene et al., 2008; MLA, 2007; Williams et al., 2006). Scholars have found that such collections contain and maintain a rich record of ‘ceremonies and important community leaders, […] significant cultural spaces, translations of language and stories, as well as audio, photographic and video material that document people and events in communities’ (Williams et al., 2006: 16). The problem, however, is that the aforementioned record is dictated by perceived ‘expert’ narratives produced by official memory institutions (Janes, 2009; Lynch, 2011). Such narratives, it has been argued, often do not bear semblance to the experiential knowledge that communities possess (Golding and Modest, 2013). According to Wallace and Vincent (2013: 1–2), if communities are not given the opportunity to record their own ‘history from below’, what passes as the official collective past is neither one they find meaningful nor one they can relate to.

The urge to challenge traditional ‘expert’ narratives derives from two key points. First, dominant versions of history often either suppress, discredit or omit oppositional representations of the past (Hein, 2000; Urry, 1995), the subsequent versions of which may alienate local communities and sections of the wider public. Until the 1980s and 1990s, this was most evident in the material displays of many mainstream museums and galleries that often omitted any meaningful engagement with and representation of local and community histories for a range of reasons – mostly of a structural and ideological nature. The main reasons for this emanated mainly from institutional acquisition and preservation protocols and their associated implicit agendas (Hooper-Greenhill, 2000; Weissberg, 1999).

Second, local communities counter hegemonic versions of history by critiquing what is perceived as the leverage that official memory institutions have gradually gained as significant sites of ‘cultural production and ideological assertion’ (Katriel, 1999: 99). This leverage is often associated with a ‘historical facticity’ whereby official memory institutions ‘sustain the fiction that the past is told “as it really was”, and [in doing so] ignore questions of point-of-view and ideological inflection in narrative constructions of the past, which would point to the possibility of alternative or oppositional readings of it.’ (Katriel, 1999: 107). Although memory institutions generally, and national museums in particular, over the past three to four decades have been developing a series of initiatives to move away from merely being repositories to enabling broader engagement in the construction and conception of our shared past (Bernstein, 2014; Hein, 2000; Hooper-Greenhill, 2000), this has mostly tended to happen in a top-down fashion that limits real, meaningful and sustainable engagement (Lynch, 2011; Watson, 2007).

One way to address this has been to look at digital technologies for solutions (Bailey, 2008; Flinn, 2007, 2010). The proliferation of digital technologies and the associated tools, it is argued, not only affords local communities and the public at large an opportunity to become involved in the curation and interpretation of our shared heritage, but it also provides the possibility to remix cultural artefacts and materials in a bid to facilitate community expression and voice (Affleck and Kvan, 2008; Ketelaar, 2003; Wallace and Vincent, 2013). Much of the research on the application of digital technologies (particularly interactive websites) in this way has focused predominantly on experimental, collaborative projects initiated by national heritage organizations with a view to engaging their users, audiences and other communities more fully with their artefacts and collections (Tallon and Walker, 2008).

Such projects have tended to take the form of collaborative digital heritage ventures ³ where national memory institutions – particularly archives and museums – encourage individual users as well as new and existing community groups to submit content and knowledge, including material relating to the description and understanding of institutional collections via social media platforms (Flinn, 2010). More recently, the wider heritage sector has witnessed a rapid increase in the popularity and adoption of crowdsourcing – an approach understood and applied to facilitate online co-curation and wider participation in harnessing a range of expertise, knowledge, ways of working, seeing and thinking with a view to rendering digital cultural heritage content more accessible, relevant and valuable both for current generations and for posterity (Boon, 2011; Owens, 2013; Proctor, 2013; Ridge, 2014).

Generally, these collaborative digital heritage ventures seem to have been successful, albeit to varying degrees. What all these ventures demonstrate in common is that they managed to bring together communities of online users willing to take part in contributing and ‘fact-checking’ a range of content that constituted shared experiences and memories and to provide corresponding metadata where this was missing. However, these ventures were initiated and designed in a top-down fashion that limited communities and individual users to commentary and not much else. Furthermore, users’ remote engagement with the institutions in question only lasted for the duration of the ventures, which were all singular undertakings. In what follows, we discuss how Science Museum: Community-in-Residence took a different approach by facilitating both offline and online spaces for a deep and meaningful engagement with the Science Museum collections.

Science Museum: Community-in-Residence: From community detective work to the physical tour of the collections storerooms

Science Museum: Community-in-Residence was preceded by a 5-month period of careful planning and organizing in which the Ceramic City Stories and Bute Island Heritage community groups were fully embedded. The pilot thrived on pre-existing ties and working relationships developed and nurtured on a storytelling project called Pararchive. ⁴ Rapport, trust, confidence and enthusiasm for a shared endeavour were much more instrumental in driving the pilot than would have been the case if the pilot had been an exclusively online venture. ⁵ Admittedly, this was only possible with a much smaller group of community members, but the key objective remained whether this would offer a way into the collections with the aid of existing digital tools, devices and social media platforms and what challenges were encountered in the process.

A key element of the planning phase involved a co-designed, preparatory 1-day visit to Blythe House – the Science Museum storerooms – which helped provide guidance and direction to the co-curatorial and participatory process that established the interests and motivations of both community groups and informed the structure of the residency. For example, given the sheer size of Blythe House with its hundreds of thousands of collections not on public display, it was clear from the outset that we would only be able to tour a selection of rooms rather than the whole store. To this end, group members were provided with a detailed list outlining an array of subject-specific collections to choose from based on what they felt was of utmost relevance and interest to them. This was particularly important because there are few places outside of the museum where this information can be accessed by the public. The choices made and common interests expressed informed the schedule of the residency which was designed and finalized collectively.

Of paramount importance to the (successful) execution of the residency was that community group members brought digital cameras, smartphones and tablets to capture the contents of the storerooms. In doing so, group members could reflect on how digital tools and devices could be utilized to improve access to the objects they were about to engage with from a very privileged position and what the limitations of the various technologies they used were. Twelve community group members from Stoke-on-Trent and the Isle of Bute participated in the residency on a late November weekend in 2014. The residency itself started with a brief introduction from the curatorial team who reiterated the overarching ideas behind the pilot and gave a brief and insightful introduction to the history of the site to which the discussion now turns.

Blythe House: From Post Office Savings Bank to a repository of un-displayed national collections

Blythe House was designed by the government architect Sir Henry Tanner in 1899 as the headquarters of the Post Office Savings Bank. The building opened in 1903 and was regarded as a modern and well-equipped office, referring specifically to the presence of electric lighting. Thousands of clerks worked at Blythe House to maintain the paper records of millions of Post Office savings accounts across Britain on a daily basis. In the mid-1970s, the Savings Bank relocated to Glasgow leaving Blythe House empty. Over the following decades, the building was used as a location for film and television production. By the mid-1980s, Blythe House had been acquired by the Property Services Agency of the Department of the Environment (the successor of the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works) to house the un-displayed collections of three national museums, namely the Science Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum (see Liffen, 2010).

As a result of its past history as well as its current use as a storeroom, Blythe House has carefully controlled atmospheric conditions and a distinctly institutional feel (Geoghegan and Hess, 2014). Collections are stored in a range of conditions: open racking, cupboards, shelves and even on pallets on the floor. This historical account immediately sparked a discussion among the group – prompted by a question about how to define an ‘archive’ that elicited a range of responses about who collected things and why, and where the ownership of archived materials lay. This, in turn, triggered a reflective process around the differences between a ‘collection’ and ‘an archive’: from the formal categories of museums to how we classify our own collection management systems at home. ⁶

On entering the stores, the tour took us through two rooms containing items related to the medical collections. The first contained over 50 years’ worth of ranging from early X-ray machines to birthing stools. The second contained the ceramics collections with hundreds of years’ worth of pharmaceutical jars, pestles and mortars. We then visited a small room with medical statues and pendants: clay hands, feet and other body parts as well as healing saints, before moving on to the Engineering room with examples of tools, looms and the decanted shipping collections (ships and associated equipment that were disassembled and transferred for storage before eventual exhibition). Finally, we visited the Communications collection that encompasses early telegraphs, through to telephones, radios and early televisions. Each room contained different objects organized in different ways. Throughout, group members photographed objects that struck them as interesting.

Where further information was needed, we took down object numbers so that these could be researched later using the Museum’s internal object database. Indeed, the metadata retrieved was instrumental not only in informing community group members’ storytelling projects but also in illuminating the social history of group members’ ancestors who might have been directly or indirectly involved in the designing, manufacturing and evaluation of some of the objects in the collections as we shall see. We attempted to record the tour as we wandered through the storerooms using audio recorders but, unfortunately, the number of speakers and the atmospheric conditions of Blythe House made these data difficult to work with.

On the next and final day of the residency, we reconvened at the Science Museum not only to discuss the findings of the previous day – particularly how digital tools and devices can be used to improve access to stored collections and associated challenges – but also to exchange ideas pertaining to wider issues arising from community–institutional relationships both online and offline. As we shall see below, the discussion reflected a range of concerns, experiences and issues around museum curatorial practices. It also foregrounded engagement with personal stories, memories and (local and regional) knowledge, and the role of digital tools in maintaining a sustained engagement with shared heritage deriving from mutual partnerships between local communities and memory institutions more widely. The discussion was captured using audio and video recording equipment. We now engage with some of the key insights yielded by the discussion.

‘Getting some public return on’ national museums through digital engagement?

We all then share that kind of anxiety about – there’s this massive public cultural investment in this national cultural saving’s bank [Blythe House] that we all need to get some public return on, in some shape or form (Participant 1).

However, the discussion moved on to the responsibilities that museums have as interpreters and gatekeepers of our national heritage:

We’ve gradually refined that down to talking about things in terms of the Science Museum or the Natural History Museum, but that’s our organisation of the stuff, but essentially it is still collections of stuff. The important bit is the interpretation, and that’s really where the public benefit of museums comes in. (Participant 2)

Virtual collections: Remote, digital connectivity to and interactivity with shared heritage

In a bid to consolidate the success of the residency – by harnessing many of the ideas generated and with a view to reaching and engaging remote audiences for the Science Museum – we developed the idea of representing the collections’ space virtually. To this end, a prototype virtual archive ¹³ was produced of collections stored in two carefully selected rooms in Blythe House: the Dentistry and Communications collections. This approach provided a test platform on which to explore the challenge faced in opening up museum and archive spaces to broader publics without compromising the integrity and safety of content therein.

The production of this prototype posed a significant challenge. The vast number of artefacts stored in each of the two spaces meant that the amount of photography, image processing and interactive authoring required to construct each of the navigable, virtual spaces was considerable. Additionally, the layout of each space posed physical constraints that made it difficult to capture artefacts effectively. Notwithstanding the challenges, the resultant prototype now consists of both interactive 360° scenes (offering a located experience of the collections and archival space itself) and high-resolution object photography (facilitating the study of the artefacts contained in that space) that can be accessed from anywhere in the world using standard web browser technology. The high-definition images contained within the prototype allow the artefacts to be studied in great detail. A good illustration of this concerns the tiny scratches on the surface of the glass of the Oscilloscope that one of the participants found intriguing as outlined earlier. Furthermore, the immersive and located experience of navigating the collections and archival space offers a new method of accessing objects and materials in storage very rarely seen by members of the public.

The following two steps are envisioned to significantly enhance the prototype in the future: (a) linking the prototype to the Science Museum internal object database records and (b) designing intuitive digital tools to allow for broader co-production of social knowledge to sit alongside the ‘formal’ database records. The first step requires users to select an object or artefact within the virtual collections and archival space. With a single click, a new information tab is displayed alongside the ‘detail view’. Expanding the tab displays the database records for the item (see Figures 1 to 3). The second step – which requires users to create an account – allows users to input their experiences, stories, memories, commentary and knowledge which then sit side by side with the ‘expert’ database records (see Figures 4 to 6). This not only captures the invaluable conversations and discussions that happen around objects that are never documented but also facilitates the collaborative production of knowledge. More importantly, it makes room for multiple perspectives and readings in the process of constructing and interpreting our shared past.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Item selection in the virtual archive – ©Tom Jackson.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Display of new information tab alongside the ‘detail view’ – ©Tom Jackson.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Display of item database records on expansion of tab – ©Tom Jackson.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

Creation of user account – ©Tom Jackson.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 5.

Selection of part of the virtual space – ©Tom Jackson.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 6.

Inscription of space with user knowledge, memories and experience – ©Tom Jackson.

The two aforementioned steps speak about three key objectives of this research which, in turn, reflect wider trends and issues in contemporary, collaborative engagement with cultural heritage in the digital era. First, linking the prototype to the Science Museum internal object database records and designing simple and intuitive digital tools to facilitate collaborative knowledge production and sense-making highlight ‘the coming together of institutional expertise with the experiences and insights of [diverse] communities, both online and on-site’ (Phillips, 2014: 254). But if the findings from our participants’ discussion above are anything to go by, ‘on-site’ engagement seems to be a rarity due a host of logistical issues around access, funding and geographical distance (including ‘travel times’, among many other things). This implies that the physical distance between the Science Museum (and indeed other national memory institutions) and local communities on the one hand and on the other, the physical distance separating local communities from each other will always remain unbridgeable.

By contrast, regular online opportunities that give users more leverage, autonomy and scope for contribution and participation – even though not aiming to particularly replicate the kind of serendipitous encounters and actual experiences generated on Science Museum: Community-in-Residence – would invariably boost much deeper, meaningful and sustained engagement with common cultural heritage. Contrary to the views that argue otherwise, this does not necessarily have to flare the tensions surrounding the perceived devaluation of ‘formal’ curatorial expertise through soliciting ‘lay’ knowledge and input in a bid to accommodate a rich plurality of perspectives (Golding and Modest, 2013; Ridge, 2014; Watson, 2007). If anything, institutional and community/public co-curation plays an instrumental role in helping update and reinterpret objects and associative social history and knowledge to reflect iterative developments in the interests of public history (Boon, 2011).

Second, the deployment of the prototype in the ways discussed above has the potential to facilitate a productive and arguably high-quality engagement with the past on open and transparent terms that may help address broader issues and concerns around veracity and truthfulness so often raised against democratizing voice and curatorial practices in the current digital age. To this end, some commentators have pointed to the downside of collaboration and connectivity in our increasingly fast-paced digital world, which fosters the generation of all kinds of content that may not always be authentic and, as such, requires mechanisms for validation (Affleck and Kvan, 2008; Ketelaar, 2003; Owens, 2013). The requirement for users to create an account to access the above-specified prototype would help guard against this to some extent by allowing institutions ‘to see an individual’s activity and to gain an understanding of who they are and the contributions they have made because this activity is displayed right along with the [formal object records]’ (Bernstein, 2014: 18). Moreover, this mode of contribution ‘would enable [users] to think more like curators and to get […] away from quick social-media style “like” button thinking to engage more deeply with the experience’ (Bernstein, 2014: 31). This, Phillips notes, is more likely to keep users interested in sharing content when in dialogue with others, especially experts (2014: 258).

Lastly, the relationship built between the Science Museum and the participating communities around the creation of the prototype is crucially important. Not only it is testing the extent to which artefacts and collections stored away from the public can be made digitally accessible and the degree to which institutional expertise and lay experiential knowledge can be balanced effectively, but it is also opening up new opportunities and research enquiries. Although this research is currently intended as a closed test and will not be publicly available as a platform prototype without further negotiation, the Science Museum is considering the possibility of capturing more storerooms using this resource in its quest to find out how best the public engage with and want to access archival material.

Here, it is crucial to invite a range of diverse heritage-focused and creative practice-oriented community groups and interested members of the public not only to help develop and test its functionality and suitability but also to use it as a platform to enhance collections to ensure their ongoing relevance. Emergent community–institutional partnerships of this kind would seem resourceful, particularly at a time when national museums are experiencing successive public funding cuts (Hein, 2000; Keene et al., 2008; Owens, 2013). Certainly, the Ceramic City Stories and Bute Island Heritage community groups that are ‘loyal and already engaged, be it online or on-site’ (Phillips, 2014: 257) would be very enthusiastic. Over and beyond the potential this research has to explore effective ways of browsing collections, and to think about their aesthetic qualities, the Science Museum is also considering using the prototype in its wider review of current storage facilities.

Conclusion

This project aimed to investigate how communities access archives and collections with a particular focus on the role of digital tools in this process. We have seen that there is a genuine interest in accessing stored collections and that the serendipity of discovery in a place not usually open to the public was part of the appeal. The guided browsing of the stores and the conversations that occurred were an important part of the experience, something that is neither provided in museum visits nor in the kind of collaborative digital heritage ventures alluded to earlier. Through this pilot, it was discovered that the building itself and the spatial experience of the collection play a significant role in guiding conversation and engagement.

All the participants felt that museums could do more to create a space for conversation and reflection. While some suggestions were made about how this could be achieved, it is still not clear how these conversation spaces would sit alongside the more conventional aspects of museum work. This becomes an even greater challenge when we begin to consider conversational spaces in the context of stored collections. The participant blogs compiled after the 2 days show that while digital tools currently available afford certain uses and practices, they also exhibit limits in relation to meeting the need for a conversation space. While the participants did post often detailed thoughts on the 2 days, interaction was generally confined to the original community groups. In these formats, unless someone knows what they are looking for, it is difficult to repeat the serendipitous discoveries found in the store. In addition, it is highly unlikely that the social media tools and resources outlined above (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Historypin and Flickr) would have the capacity to recreate the actual experiences in the storerooms.

Although the residency was a rich and useful experience for both the research team and the participants in terms of strengthening social bonds and working ties that are crucial ingredients for a sustainable and productive working relationship, it is very unlikely to be opened up to the wider public. The time and costs involved in this level of access are beyond the means of most museums to regularly provide, especially in the current economic climate. This presents a huge challenge for the heritage sector as a whole which is striving to make the transition away from being a mere repository of collections to a truly relevant community and public resource in terms of contributing to the collaborative production and circulation of knowledge and culture (Janes, 2009; Watson, 2007). However, this research demonstrated how local community groups want to use the resources of national museums. We can summarize access as:

the opportunity to browse as well as search collections;

This pilot project generated a digital prototype that not only has great potential to open up hitherto inaccessible archival and collections spaces for browsing, searching and for facilitating discussion, but the prototype also has the capacity to stimulate the desire to be led by the visual and tangible qualities of collections. Equally important is the platform the prototype offers to contribute to and converse with our national heritage. Refined and made publicly accessible, the prototype would provide a useful and welcome contribution to the way public cultural institutions more generally are reorganizing themselves in the current state of digital flux in a twofold sense: (a) by attempting to re-establish themselves as authoritative places of reference without laying claim to being arbiters of social history and the past (Hein, 2000; Janes, 2009) and (b) by fulfilling their ‘social obligation to embrace openness, increase accessibility and contribute to broader conversations’ (Phillips, 2014: 263).