The working life of Museum of London

There’s so much going on all the time at LAARC, that we thought it was about time we wrote a little update.

LAARC has 4 main remits; Curatorial, Research, Education and Leadership.

Curatorial

This year so far has seen two LAARC Volunteer Inclusion Projects (LAARC VIP) take place within the archive. These aim to involve a wide range of people from London’s communities and offer them transferable skills and archaeological archiving experience. In return the archive gets a team helping to improve the storage and accessibility of our collections. Including the first of these VIP projects, which took place Sept-Dec 2008, over 70 volunteers have joined us and together we have processed all the material from sites excavated in 1972 and 1973 – this translates to over 1000 boxes of stuff and well over a mixture of 50,000 individual sherds, fragments and complete objects. For more info visit www.laarcvip3.wetpaint.com

In addition to our VIP projects, 15 long term volunteers join us one day a week, working on improving large site archives, including that of the Royal Mint (MIN86), Whitehall Palace (WPA61), Old Billingsgate Lorry Park (BIG82) and Southwark Street (15SKS80)

Without our team of volunteers, the archive would never have achieved as much as it has. From Jan – Jun 2009, our team have already contributed 563 days of volunteering. Impressive.

Research

During the first 6 months of the year, we have had almost 400 academic enquiries. Researchers have ranged from primary school children to internationally reknowned professors, looking at records and finds from Amphora makers stamps to Kosher lead seals to photos of archaeologists to erotic shaped artefacts!

Education

Athough without a specific education officer on our staff, we have still managed to engage with a vast amount of people, including 566 children  and 1208 adults via open day events, school outreach and other external events. In addition 605 people have visited the LAARC so far in 2009, learning about our collections, processes and purpose.

Leadership

Still reknowned as Leaders in our field of archaeological archiving, visitors from Canada, Pakistan, Scotland, Russia, Mozambique, Ghanaians Turkey have all come to gain an insight into what we do and be inspired by the systems we’ve put in place.

In addition we’ve appeared in magazine and newspaper articles and hosted the filming  of a couple of scenes for documentaries involving our collections.

We also have continued to promote website interaction and you can join in too by having a say in our object of the month competition:

www.objectofthemonth.wetpaint.com

Thanks to everyone who continues to support our work at the LAARC and let’s see what the next six months will bring.