The working life of Museum of London

As part of our 10 year celebrations each week we’ll be posting Volunteer Profiles to let you find out a bit more about some of LAARC’s excellent volunteers that have returned for the current, museum-based project. Today, it’s Braena

1) When did you join the volunteer programme and why?
I joined the VIP in Summer 2011 to gain more experience in archives and handling of archaeological material

2) What was your most memorable day whilst volunteering?
The day when we had a seminar on leather artefacts

3) What was your favourite object you discovered whilst volunteering?
One of the roman shoes we came across

4) What’s your favourite part of the museum?
London before London

5) Upper galleries of lower?
Upper galleries

6) Favourite year in London’s history?
No favourite year – I’m interested in roman, medieval and tudor periods

7) Favourite Londoner?
Too many to choose from.

8) Mortimer Wheeler or Indiana Jones
Mortimer Wheeler!

9) If you could dig anywhere in the world where would you excavate?
Egypt

10) What’s next for you after this project?
A placement with the Portable Antiquities Scheme

Since my last post back in December a lot has happened in the world of digital preservation at LAARC (London Archaeological Archive and Research Centre). We have taken in several large archive deposits, including a great deal of digital images relating to a number of Olympic development sites, and I’m currently busily processing the deposits in order to make them accessible through our online catalogue.

We’ve also had a number of enquiries regarding our collections, ranging from a request for information on fish bone samples from archaeological sites, to questions about plans and standing building drawings of a church in the City of London which we hold in our collection. While these are standard enquiries for a collection like LAARC, they do sometimes involve the investigation of our legacy data to find out exactly what information is available.

So, what exactly is legacy data I hear you ask? Well, in the context of digital preservation it is often used to refer to files or data stored in old or potentially obsolete formats, which as a result can be difficult to access and even harder to interpret. As a result, and in particular when dealing with enquiries relating to archaeological excavations which occurred in the 1980’s and early 1990’s (when digital records were being created, but the idea of digital preservation hadn’t really entered our consciousness), it is sometimes necessary to conduct searches across this legacy data, extrapolate the required information, and manipulate and migrate the data into a more accessible format, while ensuring that the data itself has not been altered in the process.

Part of our legacy toolkit at LAARC!

Our standards and guidance for deposition, and our work with current depositors of archaeological records, aims to ensure that we are not faced with these problems for current and future digital deposits. However, for digital records that were created before such standards were in place, we simply have to deal with the data in whatever form we have it, and work to the best of our abilities to extract the required information. Our long term goal is to process and migrate all of the legacy data we currently hold into accessible formats which we can then provide access to online, but with legacy data from over 670 sites, it will take some time!!

I was lucky enough to get an opportunity to talk about some of these issues when I was invited to give a short presentation at the Digital Preservation: What I Wish I Knew Before I Started event, organised and co-hosted by the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and the Archives and Records Association (ARA) back in January. The event aimed to give ideas and practical advice concerning digital preservation to current archive and records management students, and hopefully inspire them to get involved in this particular area. For anyone interested, all the presentations from the day are available at the DPC event page and comments from the day can be found on Twitter by searching the hashtag #dpc_wiwik.

Finally, I can’t write a blog about my work at LAARC without mentioning that it’s our 10th anniversary this year – and we are running a number of events and hands on activities both at LAARC and the Museum of London to celebrate. I had my first experience of these when I participated in the Archaeology Up Close day on the 20th January, when we put on a display of finds and records on the theme of ‘Made in London’. Various finds were on show which provided evidence for shoe making in the Roman period, medieval glass and ceramic making, and post medieval clay tobacco pipe manufacturing. It was great to be able to share our collections, and passion for archaeology, with visitors to the museum, and for my part it was certainly nice to get away from my computer for a day! Various LAARC staff will be at the Museum every Monday, Tuesday and Friday for the next 8 weeks, talking about our archive collections and archaeology in general, so come and say hello when you are on your next visit, and follow the LAARC VIP blog for more info.

LAARC staff talking to (hopefully) interested members of the public about archaeology

Welcome to the February Dickens Book Club.

My name is Sally, the Librarian at the Museum of London, and I have volunteered to read Bleak House with the book club as it is a novel I studied at school (rather a long time ago now) and enjoyed. 

Whereas studying ‘Silas Marner’ put me right off George Eliot, ‘Bleak House’ was so good it  encouraged me to go on and read other books by Dickens, although none of them ever seemed to match up to original impact of ‘Bleak House’.

I am looking forward to revisiting the novel as an older person, and I am also going to be reversing my Luddite tendencies and will be reading the novel on an e-reader, a well-known version of which was given to me as a Christmas present and on which my second download was the complete works of Dickens.

‘Bleak House’ followed the familiar publishing route for a Dickens novel, in that it was published as a partwork, over 19 monthly instalments (the last one being a double issue), from March 1852 to September 1853.

While readers at the time would have had a month to consume a few chapters, we will be reading the novel over just one short month, which means aiming to read at the rate of 2.5 chapters a day (well, that’s the plan).

As I remember, we will be encountering the whole gamut of Victorian society, from the homeless poor to the landed aristocracy, and will encounter issues of the day, such as slum clearance, sanitary reform, philanthropy, the development of a detective branch of the Met., and the iniquities of never-ending court cases. 

Encompassing it all is London – dirty, decaying and foggy – so let’s get started with the most magnificent opening of any Dickens novel, and immerse ourselves in fog…..

If you would like to join Sally in reading Bleak House our friends at Foyles are offering Dickens Book Club followers an additional 10% discount for online purchases of  the novel here. Simply enter ‘MOLBC’ at Checkout to activate this discount.

Vauxhall, 1785 by Thomas Rowlandson

Pleasure gardens competed for visitors, vying with each other to offer evermore exciting entertainments. Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens offered a wide variety of entertainment, including lion-tamers, trampoline clowns, fortune tellers, ventriloquists, monkeys, dogs, jugglers, horses who danced to a waltz and fire walkers.

Tournaire's Equestrians, Vauxhall Gardens, 1846

Costumes from the Museum of London’s pleasure gardens

The Museum of London’s pleasure gardens

This year the LAARC (London Archaeological Archive & Research Centre) marks its 10^th anniversary. To celebrate our achievement of promoting London’s archaeology and making our collections publicly accessible we’re in residence at the Museum of London’s galleries. You can even join in yourself and assist us in improving our collections by getting your Hands-On real Archaeology.

Although the Archive holds a wealth of information from maps, drawings, digital data, context sheets to photographs, it is perhaps archaeology – the ‘stuff’ – filling over 200,000 archive boxes that we are all instantly drawn to. Our ‘general finds’ are the bread and butter of archaeology but for the most part it is our ‘registered finds’ that are intrinsically interesting.

For several years my colleague Adam has been blogging about these noteworthy objects that lie dormant in the Archive waiting to be researched, audited by a volunteer or even make it into a Museum of London gallery display.

Over the next year I’ll be presenting you with ten archaeological objects. Ten objects that emphasise the importance of London’s archaeology in shaping, or even reshaping, our understanding of the City’s history. I have literally over millions of artefacts to choose from, but this won’t be a display of the shiniest or most well-known. My selections may be representative of, or even unique to, an historical period. They may acknowledge the science of how these objects are discovered and how they survive London’s chthonic depths over millennia.

Like all good history we’ll start at ‘the beginning’:

Object 1

Prehistoric (Upper Palaeolithic) Leaf-point Flint Blade 

The first of our objects is a flint blade (not so interesting you may think…). Dredged from the Thames at Longreach (opposite Purfleet) in April 1905, it came to us via the late Geoffrey Gillam of Enfield. This is a classic example of a museum object that has lain dormant; its significance waiting to be unlocked, for this prehistoric flint may actually be the earliest example of an artefact crafted by a ‘Londoner’ in the Museum’s collection.

Our first Londoner in this instance would be a modern human, that is, homo sapiens sapiens. It was during the Upper Palaeolithic, about 40, 000 years ago, that modern humans developed blade technology (our predecessors, Neanderthals, perhaps being commonly associated with flake technology produced hand-axes) resulting in a huge range of stone artefacts being crafted. At the same time scholars have also argued about the inherent aestheticism of these objects – and we may even be looking at London’s earliest ‘work of art’! Lithics expert, Jon Cotton, ‘re-discovered’ this object with colleagues and they will hopefully be publishing it in the near future.

Next month object number 2 – where we’ll skip past a few millennia (and a lot more flints) to the Iron Age…

Have the recent TV and radio adaptations alongside celebrations for the upcoming 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens seen you revisit or read for the first time a work by this creative genius?

If so there is still time to join our Dickens Book Club and share your thoughts on the work of this great author via Facebook and Twitter.

We will be focusing on Bleak House in February, sharing favourite passages and our thoughts as we progress through this work.

We will also be completing our reading of Barnaby Rudge from January, so do look out for updates here as the novel approaches the Gordon Riots of 1780.

When the book club was launched in September 2011  we decided to ask our social media followers which work of Dickens to read to close our book club in May 2012.

Having reviewed the suggestions and comments received. The title that we have chosen to feature in May is David Copperfield. With its “memorable characters written in the first person” this was agreed to be a worthy title to close our book club celebrations of Charles Dickens work.

Alongside this online book club we have also been running a series of book club events at Foyles Bookshop flagship store at Charing Cross, London. The next meeting is being held at 6.30pm on Monday 6 February 2012 focusing on Bleak House with our Dickens and London exhibition curator Alex Werner.

 There is no need to book just turn up on the night and meet in person other fans and aficionados of Dickens.

Our books clubs are ran in support of our Dickens and London exhibition at the Museum of London which is open until 10 June 2012.

Each week we’re posting volunteer profiles letting you find out a little bit about our excellent team that are based in the museum as part of our 10th anniversary events. Today’s volunteer is Pam:

1) When did you join the volunteer programme and why?
2006 due to an interest in history and archaeology

2) What was your most memorable day whilst volunteering?
They are all great

3) What was your favourite object you discovered whilst volunteering?
So many, I can’t possibly choose just one!

4) What’s your favourite part of the museum?
LAARC

5) Upper galleries of lower?
Both but I really like both the prehistory and roman ones

6) Favourite year in London’s history?
44AD

7) Favourite Londoner?
Robert Hooke

8) Mortimer Wheeler or Indiana Jones
Mortimer Wheeler!

9) If you could dig anywhere in the world where would you excavate?
Catal Huyuk, a Neolithic site in Turkey

10) What’s next for you after this project?
Back to the archive!

As part of our collections online programme bringing greater online access to our collections over the next three years, including the addition of over 90,000 objects. Project Assistant, Ed, talks us through his work with the Museum’s Roman coin collection:

The Museum’s Roman collection boasts some very fine examples of bronze, silver and gold coinage, and traces the history of Rome from the Republic, through the rise and eventual decline of the Empire, and culminates in the ascendancy of Byzantium.

The collection spans a period of no-less than seven centuries and represents over 100 different emperors, empresses, princes, rebels and usurpers.

The biggest challenge in working with this collection stems from the sheer volume of coin designs that the emperors could produce.

Recently I have been working with the coins of Emperor Domitian (81-96AD). Domitian alone was responsible for producing over 400 different coin designs during his 15 year reign. This is obviously a huge amount, but such numbers are not uncommon, and indeed such an output is dwarfed by that of others, such as Hadrian, who introduced nearly 1100 different coin designs during his rule, 117-138AD.

It may initially seem surprising that the emperors put so much thought into their coinage.

However, in a period before mass media, coins offered the perfect opportunity for the emperors to ‘meet’ their public. The minting of coins was the greatest source of propaganda available to the emperors.

They range of designs is astonishing. Coins were issued to commemorate great military victories, grand building projects, the quelling of rebellions and to celebrate the might and history of Rome.

They also gave ample opportunity for the emperors to associate themselves and their rule with a particular god, goddess or virtue by depicting them on the reverse.

In this respect the coins offer a real window into the ideology, principles and concerns of the emperors themselves. They could choose to depict themselves as philosophers, facilitators of peace and prosperity, or conversely, they could adopt a very different stance and associate themselves with Mars, the god of war, showing that they were prepared to hold onto their power with an iron fist if circumstances required it.

With such a vast array of coins being minted, correct identification offers a significant challenge.

Fortunately much of the collection is very well preserved. Some of the coins appear as if struck yesterday, and are identified and read as easily as they would have been millennia ago. However, time has taken its toll on many others.

The portraits are worn and reverses corroded, inscriptions are obliterated and details reduced to little more than a few lumps and bumps. In a few cases, identification is simply impossible. However, more often than not, identification can be made from the slightest of details. Until the fourth century the portraits of the emperors are very distinctive; subsequently, little more than the curve of the nose or the curl of a beard can give away their identity. Similarly the flick of a wing or the angle of an arm can all help identify the figure on the reverse.

I feel incredibly lucky to be able to handle these objects on a daily basis, and think of the many hands they may have passed between in their long history and the day to day transaction they may have been involved in. Yet, they are not simply discs of metal used to buy bread, wine, clothing or even be exchanged for possible brothel tokens! They can give us a real insight into the minds of the emperors themselves and the state and character of the empire.

I hope that when these coins are made available online to the public  in the summer of 2012 you will find them as interesting as I do.

It is hoped that by opening up of this collection online it will not only help the Museum engage with a wider public audience, but also offer a considerable contribution to the understanding of Roman numismatics in London, and provide increased opportunity for further enquiry, study and fresh analysis.

All images copyright Museum of London.

Day 1 of the Archaeological Archive’s 10th Anniversary Celebrations

If you happened to visit the Museum of London today, did you spot us? The staff and volunteers at the London Archaeological Archive & Research Centre (LAARC) have begun our 10 week residency at the Museum to share our work with you! And if you weren’t at the museum today, here’s what you missed:

Outside our “London Before London” gallery, our archive manager had a selection of goodies:

• Visitors handled objects made in London almost 2000 years ago
• Visitors looked at the original records sheets that archaeologists wrote whilst they were digging up sites.
• School groups had fun trying to figure out a mystery object whose identity was revealed by an  x-ray
• Teachers admired a range of artefacts dug up by school children during our 2005 community project
• Londoners searched our online catalogue to find out what’s been dug up in their area
• One budding young archaeologist tried on a hard hat and held a trowel for the first time!

Meanwhile, a bit further on in “Archaeology In Action” all this was going on:

• Conservation students from University College London were showing people how a piece of wood deteriorates if not looked after.
• There was more guessing of mystery objects using x-rays for answers
• Visitors were handling, comparing (and sniffing) pieces of leather, all conserved in different ways.
• You could take a look at how conservators remove very fragile objects from an excavation

Alongside the conservators were LAARC volunteers:

• Packing archaeological finds, they were chatting to visitors about what they were doing.
• Visitors were able to pick up and handle real objects
• You could discover how we store artefacts at the museum and why we do so

To cap things off several visitors joined us for our afternoon workshop – Hands-On Archaeology – where they learnt a bit about London’s Archaeological history, got their “hands on” some real roman pottery, worked alongside volunteers and sorted pots into different types and helped us improve the way these pot sherds are stored.

So all in all it was a pretty awesome day. It was great to meet so many visitors and share a bit of our work with them. And if you weren’t there today, don’t worry, we’re doing it all again tomorrow and on Friday and indeed, we’ll be around for the next 10 weeks, so come along and say hi.

For more information about our various events visit our website’s events pages: events pages link

Happy New Year from the Visitor Services team and welcome back after what has been a very busy festive period for the Hosts here at the Museum of London.

To start of the New Year, I give just a quick update of the events and activities over Christmas, and what you can expect in the following months.

I am very happy to report that our very first Santa and Scrooge’s Victorian Grottoes were a runaway success, and greatly exceeded our wildest expectations. The Hosts have put a lot of hard work and effort into making a success of the project, and can give themselves a well-deserved pat on the back for job well done.

Both Santa and Scrooge were very popular with children and parents alike, and if 2011 was anything to go by, we anticipate another sell-out event for 2012 and anyone interest in visiting will be well-advised to book in advance!

It was not just Santa and Scrooge which made headlines. Our much advertised Dickens exhibition opened with much pomp and ceremony in December, and kept us Hosts on our toes trying to keep up for demand for tickets.

A lot of time, energy and resources have gone into making this one of our most exciting exhibitions in the Museum’s history, and the positive feedback from both visitors and the press alike is a great reward for everyone involved in the exhibition.

It is the first major Charles Dickens exhibition in the UK in more than 40 years and includes original manuscripts, his desk and chair, as well as a specially commissioned film to explore the similarity between London at night time today and the city which Dickens had described 150 years ago. Book in advance to qualify for discounted tickets!

I also want to welcome our new Hosts who joined us recently. Some of them are in the photo above.

After successfully completing two weeks of training, they’ve been thrown into the deep end and shown remarkable resilience, and also brought a lot of enthusiasm to the team for the New Year.

I speak for the whole team when I say that we look forward to welcoming you to the Museum during your next visit!

Giusy