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‘Something simple and striking, if not amusing’ – the Freedom 7 special exhibition at the Science Museum, 1965
The Mercury capsule Freedom 7 was displayed at the Science Museum in 1965–66. This was well documented through photographs in addition to textual documents. This paper proposes an analysis of the exhibition in the light of these records.
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A symposium on histories of use and tacit skills
The histories of use of the objects in museum collections, and the unrecorded skills of their operation, have posed pressing research questions for museum people and university scholars alike. This symposium drew together different perspectives on this emerging area of study.
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‘A Chamber of Noise Horrors’: sound, technology and the museum
This article analyses the 1935 Science Museum Noise Abatement exhibition in order to draw wider conclusions about technological sound and the museum and to make an argument in favour of hearing museum sound historically.
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Collecting the personal: stories of domestic energy and everyday life at the National Museum of Scotland
The Energise gallery at the National Museum of Scotland explores the sources, generation, distribution and use of energy and questions how science and technology transform how we power our lives. This article details three objects around which a focus on personal stories was adopted.
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Contexts for photography collections at the National Media Museum
In 2016 the National Media Museum transferred parts of its photographic collections to the Victoria and Albert Museum. This article examines the reactions to this decision to understand what it can tell us about public perceptions of the role of museums, and places the transfer in the wider contexts of sustainable collecting practices, economic pressures and local circumstances.
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Editorial
Editorial Issue 07
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Embedding plurality: exploring participatory practice in the development of a new permanent gallery
This paper contributes to a critical understanding of current language and discourses of participatory and co-creative practices, through a case study of a large, permanent exhibition development – the Science Museum's Information Age gallery – which opened in 2014.
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Location, location: a polemic on photographs and institutional practices
This essay explores the ambiguous status of photographs in museums and the impact of institutional thought-landscapes on that status. Which photographs are understood as ‘important’ and thus collectable and which are not, and under what conditions?
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Moments of danger
This article takes an exhibition I co-curated for the Science Museum and National Science and Media Museum as the starting point for a reflection on the relationships between neoliberal politics, the histories of photography, and the social meanings of science and technology.
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Museums theme – Adventures in Museology: category building over a century, and the context for experiments in reinvigorating the Science Museum at the turn of the twenty-first century
Acting as an introduction to articles in this issue on a museums theme, this paper discusses the long-term history of science museums and the conjuncture of the late twentieth century which precipitated innovations in various science museums described in the collection.