The working life of Museum of London

I’m really excited to be able to tell you about a new project that’s recently gone live – ‘Podcasts from the past‘. It’s a series of ten audio descriptions of objects in the London before London and Medieval galleries at the Museum of London.

You can find Podcasts from the Past on iTunes with this link (or search for “podcasts from the past” or for artist “museum of london”), or point your browser at the RSS feed. You can also find out more about the individual podcasts and download the files directly at Podcasts from the past.
This project is part of the Museum’s Community & Audience Development Inclusion programme, and is managed by Inclusion Officer Lucie Fitton. I’ll let Lucie, our Inclusion Officer, introduce it in her own words:

Here at the Museum of London we wanted to do two things through this projects. One, make a step towards providing more resources for our visually impaired visitors (existing and potential). Two, by working with a group of real Londoners (by that we mean normal people living in this city, and not museum staff or specialists) to create them, we would be offering an interpretation of the collections that would be relevant and interesting to more people. Yes, these podcasts aim to describe museum objects to people who may not be able to see them clearly, but by opening your ears everyone can understand London’s story in a new way.

It was a huge task for anyone, let alone a group of people who hadn’t met, hadn’t visited the Museum before, hadn’t created audio description and hadn’t used recording and editing technology. The 10 podcasts were created in eight weeks, with just one day of workshop time each week.

Luckily we had some fantastic help from the experts. A couple of our curators showed the group around the galleries and provided invaluable advice about the objects. We then had training with Vocaleyes who showed us the basics of describing for visually impaired people. We also got the chance to meet Kirin, who is visually impaired and helped dispel myths around what it is like. Once the scripts were written we then worked with podcast producers from SoundDelivery to record and edit the final podcast. It was lots of hard work, but great fun.

The seven participants of this project come from a wide variety of backgrounds and had many skills and talents to add to this project. We hope they walk away with many more. Thanks to Charles Clark, Ivan Bello, James Kelly, Keith Allen, Liam McAtamney, Simon Allen and Warren Thompson. Also a big thank you to Tony and Kirin from Vocaleyes, and Jude, Mark and Lee from SoundDelivery.

Lucie’s also previously written about her role as Inclusion Officer and Community projects at the Museum of London. You can also see photos from the podcast workshops, including photos of the objects, on our Flickr page.

I think it’s a lovely way to find out more about some objects you can visit in our galleries, so check them out and let us know what you think.