National Trust Collections Online

I said in my previous post that I had been working on something quite big recently and it seems a shame to not do a post about it and here it is; National Trust Collections Online.

National Trust Collections Online allows you to search the majority of our collections

 

Last Friday the Trust launched a website which allows the public to search ourcollections. Currently we have 735,045 items are online and it contains all the things you might expect to find in our collections such as great work of art at Petworth through to Ellen Terry’s ‘Beetle Wing’ dress which she wore as Lady Macbeth. However there are also the things you might not expect such as blouses from Marks and Spencer! It is certainly well worth looking at and is accessible online here:

 

http://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/

 

Why not have a look and see what our staff have selected as highlights of our collections, which can be seen by view our collections a-z and selecting one of our places!

Back to Basics

I’ve been incredibly busy the past few weeks, working on the finishing touches on a rather large project which I will almost certainly do a blog entry about next week. As such I haven’t had time to update my blog recently, however getting a reference by IWM’s Social Interpretation Project reminded me to update the blog. It looks like an incredibly interesting project!

So what have I been up to recently, while apart from working on my rather large project. I have also been heavily involved in an inventory project at some of our London Places, mostly 2 Willow Road and Fenton House.

2 Willow Road, one of the places where we are currently working on our inventories.

 Although we use the term inventory project as a catch-all term for what we’re doing, it actually involves lots of different elements of work. A colleague of mine has been working on loans at 2 Willow Road and cataloguing some really interesting objects. We both spent part of last week taking inventory photographs of objects at Fenton House ranging from lots of paintings through some brilliant early keyboard instruments. Of course it isn’t all hard work and finished off on Friday night at a rather eccentric pub in Belgravia where you can’t use mobile phones and has a rather interesting range of objects on the walls including some bayonets over the fireplace.

If this sounds like the sort of thing you might be interested in doing we are also currently looking for four interns to work with us on the project. The information should be appearing on Leicester University Museum Studies Jobs Desk tomorrow. However if you are interested you can also contact me directly here and I will send you all the information you need to apply along with an application form.

the web is what you make of it

I was watching TV last night and saw the new U.K Google Chrome Advert, it was a really good advert and well worth checking out. Apart from highlight alot of googles services, it really made me think. I think in many ways it sums up so much about the ways we are increasingly using the web such as photo sharing/video sharing etc. It also had the fantastic end line of ‘the web is what you make of it’.

Way back at the begining of the year I posted a overview of the ones to watch in digital/social media. One of the main things that was predicted is that online photo sharing would become more popular. Well I think we can say that this definitely probably true. Last week Twitter dived into the photo and video sharing experience with a native picture/video sharing function. You can check out what this will look like here.

Of course just like the google advert says, the web is exactly what you make of it. I’ve never been a huge fan of Twitter, maybe because not many of my friends are on Twitter. However I can see the huge potential these new functions. My interests are in collections, so you post your top ten objects using a #tag to your twitter followers, or perhaps have an object of the month #tag. I think the potential to crowd source lots of interesting photos which is really exciting! You could do with anything hashtagging pictures of peoples own favourite objects through to pictures from events or even favourite landscapes.

Turning on the Lights

Hi my name is Adam and I’m the new Collections Engagement Officer for the National Trust in the South East Region and this is a blog that I’ll be updating over the course of the next year.

As well as getting to know this entirely new role I’ve been stressing and thinking about exactly what I’m going to write about over the last two weeks. I’ve been drawing ideas from lots of different blogs around the internet and have came to the following conclusion; although this blog is about collections owned by the national trust I didn’t want to make another version of Emile de Bruijn’s excellent blog Treasure Hunt.

So what I’ve decided to do is leave it fairly open, I’m going to talk about collections and objects, but I’m also going to talk about the ways we and others have put the ‘spotlight’ on collections. I’m going to talk about using social media, augmented reality and online exhibitions. I may also from time to time talk about other things. So I’m open to suggestions and ideas so please feel free to leave any comments!