The Pararchive Project

Claire Adler – Heritage Lottery Fund Appointed Special Advisor for Community and Learning – shares ten essential tips on how to develop an HLF funded project.

In this piece by Gina Fairley, not only is the link between archives and culture made explicit, but the role of digitisation in facilitating broader access to and wider engagement with shared heritage is highlighted. The following comments from a contributor to the piece appear to capture this well: “Archives are unsettling, and have within…

“…data can be and should be terrain for exploration, forum for interrogation, and substrate for creation. There is prose and poetry and performance to be made from these rows and columns.” More at… medium.com/digital-moma/thousands-of-exhausted-things-or-why-we-dedicated-moma-s-collection-data-to-the-public-domain-7e0a7165e99

…a series of workshops involving the creation of several interactive, rich-media museum stories. Digital narrations were authored by experts (museum educators, archaeologists, designers, writers, media producers, and other related professionals) who were brought together and collaborated in numerous intensive, hands-on participatory design workshops. The events were monitored in order to both evaluate the usability of…

“Would you ever consider loaning out items in your collection? If so, think about whom you might make a loan to and how you’d want to handle any such transactions.” More at… unclutterer.com/2015/02/19/personal-collectors-can-learn-museums

“…many museums have a secret room (or two or ten) well out of the public eye. Here are a few of those, full of books, boobs, and beetles.” I wonder, will our Science Museum and National Media Museum partners have some secret rooms for us to integrate into the Pararchive app? 😉 More at Atlas Obscura…

  In an update on her Pararchive research project entitled Back to the Future: When Wearable Technology Meets Archive Content, we learnt how Michelle – a member of the MadLab Manchester Arduino Group and Founder and Director of Made With Glove Ltd – is designing fashionable heated gloves for women who suffer from the Raynaud’s…

  Following on from the First World War Engagement Centres Everyday Lives in War and Hidden Histories we now look at Voices of War and Peace: the Great War and its legacy. Voices of War – or Voices as it will be referred to henceforth in this piece – is based in the Library of…

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will be a gathering place to experience narrative art and the evolution of moving images – from illustration to cinema to the digital mediums of the future. The museum’s seed collection – a gift from founder George Lucas – spans a century-and-a-half and features the images and the mediums…

In considering archives and collections, we’ve generally been exploring digital simulcra of real artefacts and those that are ‘born digital’. However, some artefacts are not only intrinsically digital, but also inhabit a intersection of shapeshifting networks and adaptive interpretations. Software artefacts in particular can only be considered in relation to hardware platforms, programming languages and notably versions and iterations.…