What happened when children in the Reception classes at Abbey Meadows Primary School came to visit the Whistler & Nature exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum? In January, we welcomed children in the Reception classes (aged 4-5) from a local school to explore the Whistler and Nature exhibition, thanks to a generous travel bursary from the Friends of the Fitzwilliam Museum…
Can you hear when a pigment has been ground to the right particle size? How do we know which plastics in a museum are going to self-destruct? Why is conservation documentation like a pile of dirty laundry? Can you make a priceless book full of moving paper parts and almost 500 years old accessible to all? Did the Pacific island…
Ely Science Festival this year focused on showcasing space science, marking the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing. Held in the magnificent setting of Ely Cathedral, this was a great opportunity for the Sedgwick and Whipple Museums to take their collections and expertise out to new audiences, many of whom were not familiar with our museums. Throughout the festival, meteorites…
What happened when children in the Reception classes at Abbey Meadows Primary School came to visit the Whistler & Nature exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum? In January, we welcomed children in the Reception classes (aged 4-5) from a local school to explore the Whistler and Nature exhibition, thanks to a generous travel bursary from the Friends of the Fitzwilliam Museum…
What links a sarcophagus, a Millais painting, an exquisite Anglo-Norman manuscript, and a large tureen in the shape of a carp? Seemingly nothing, but that is the joy of the Fitzwilliam Museum’s collections: something for everyone. But what would it be like for the collection to truly reach everyone? I am entirely thrilled to be one of four postdoctoral researchers…
What can our museums contribute to audiences understanding issues about the environment? Find out about the work behind our new puzzle solving team-game, Operation Survival. What is Operation Survival? It’s a live action team game facilitated by actors and staff from games company Fire Hazard Games. Teams are set the challenge of solving a series of puzzles and clues, with the…
The Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences has an active group of gallery volunteers who welcome visitors in to the Museum and provide information about the exhibitions, collections and Museum itself. The Museum’s most recent addition to the team is local palaeontology enthusiast, 18-year-old Elliott Cowie. Elliott has chatted to Museum Administrator Sarah Hammond about his love of fossils and how…
Over the last 18 months we have been working hard on developing our enrichment programme for teachers at the Fitzwilliam Museum. This blog gives an overview of what we tried, what worked and what didn’t. From September 2017 to July 2018 we ran 12 sessions for just under 100 teachers from 40 different schools. The aims of the sessions varied…
Can you hear when a pigment has been ground to the right particle size? How do we know which plastics in a museum are going to self-destruct? Why is conservation documentation like a pile of dirty laundry? Can you make a priceless book full of moving paper parts and almost 500 years old accessible to all? Did the Pacific island…
The University of Cambridge’s historic collections reveal centuries of scholarship and discovery; artistic and technological excellence. They also evidence darker, far more challenging histories: histories of exploitation, colonialism and systematic power imbalances. Museums are not neutral. Historically, and in the present day, who makes decisions impacts upon which narratives are privileged in our spaces and which are silenced; who is represented…
