How can arts and cultural organisations evaluate the quality and impact of our work with children and young people? Over the last 18 months, members of the University of Cambridge Museums (UCM) Learning Team have been working on an evaluation project with colleagues from the National Gallery, part of an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project in partnership…
1 July saw the start of the second week of University of Cambridge Museums Work Experience, with students from Swavesey Village College, Comberton Village College and Chesterton Community College spending a week split between the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Whipple Museum of the History of Science and Kettle’s Yard. Why did you want to do work experience with the University of…
How can arts and cultural organisations evaluate the quality and impact of our work with children and young people? Over the last 18 months, members of the University of Cambridge Museums (UCM) Learning Team have been working on an evaluation project with colleagues from the National Gallery, part of an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project in partnership…
The plan was this: invite twelve young people into the museum, fill their brains with information about the Polar Regions and museum displays and then ask them to produce the framework for a temporary exhibition about climate change. In a week. There is a lot of buzz around ‘co-curation’ projects at the moment. The idea is, by bringing in an…
Here at the Fitzwilliam Museum, we want to inspire young artists by giving them access to our incredible collections and a wide range of high quality creative materials. Here we used digital tools alongside more traditional resources to help very young children explore and create their own art. Following on from our collaborative projects with the UCM Digital Maker in…
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 do a Polar map, a Egyptian coffin, the earliest animal fossils and an exhibition on the Pacific have in common? They were all winners in this year’s University of Cambridge Vice-Chancellor’s Research and Impact Engagement Awards, in which four projects at the University of Cambridge Museums scooped prizes. The prizes recognise the important role our museums play in sharing…
1 July saw the start of the second week of University of Cambridge Museums Work Experience, with students from Swavesey Village College, Comberton Village College and Chesterton Community College spending a week split between the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Whipple Museum of the History of Science and Kettle’s Yard. Why did you want to do work experience with the University of…
The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) houses outstanding collections from the Cambridgeshire region, but for much of this material little has been documented and photographed. What happens when we delve into this material, sometimes for the first time since it arrived in the museum, and how can we make it better known? In 1923 Sir Cyril Fox published his…
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…
