Our Country Lives update: Bringing our wagons down to earth
Alongside finalising gallery layouts, coming up with exciting ideas for interactive displays and filling in foundations for our extensions, our biggest update for you this week is the removal of our wagons from their monorail. We managed to finish the job in one day with the help of a specialist removal company, a fork-lift truck […]
What have we been up to? An Our Country Lives update
A common reaction from people when we tell them that our galleries are closed is ‘Does that mean you’re all on holiday?’ Well, we’ve actually been intensely busy behind the scenes since November creating the new MERL! Here’s a round-up of some of the things we’ve been doing: 1. While the galleries have been closed, our […]
The Great University of Reading Museums and Special Collections #12off
The Great University of Reading Museums and Special Collections #12off: It doesn’t exactly roll of the tongue, does it, but the idea for a MERL #12daysofChristmas series of tweets emerged in one of our weekly social media meetings before Christmas, and our colleagues at the Ure Museum and the Special Collections jumped at the chance […]
MERL in Marseilles: reflections on the International Congress of Agricultural Museums
Ollie Douglas, Assistant Curator at MERL, reflects on the common challenges faced by museums similar to MERL around the world, after attending the International Congress of Agricultural Museums. At the beginning of November, Isabel Hughes, MERL Curator, and I travelled to Marseilles to present MERL’s latest ideas to an international audience. Our presentations formed part of […]
Discovering the Landscape #9: 1000 books catalogued!
Written by Claire Wooldridge, Project Senior Library Assistant: Landscape Institute We are delighted to be able to say 1000 books from the Landscape Institute library have now been integrated into our MERL library collection. Each book has been cleaned, processed, catalogued and labelled. The books are available in our open access library. A small number of rare books […]
Weekly what's on: 24th to 28th November
Although the MERL galleries and garden are currently closed for redevelopment, there are still events and activities taking place at the Museum and Special Collections. Below are details of this week’s events. Further details of forthcoming events can be found on the MERL What’s On pages or on the Special Collections pages. Huntley & Palmers: a Christmas selection 25 […]
Changing Faces: Dismantling the old Museum
Written by Adam Koszary, Project Officer for Our Country Lives. The Museum has now been closed a little over two weeks, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy behind the scenes. Although visitors to our Archive & Library, steered through the shop to our tranquil Reading Room, may be entirely unaware of the scale of […]
Discovering the Landscape #8: New Pinterest board
Written by Claire Wooldridge, Project Senior Library Assistant: Landscape Institute The Landscape Institute collections are exciting and visual, as can be seen through the wealth of images we have used in this ‘Discovering the Landscape’ series of blog posts. Now we have created a new Pinterest board dedicated to the Landscape Institute on MERL’s Pinterest site. Pinterest is […]
Project update: Shut, but not shutting up!
Alison Hilton, Marketing Officer, explains that although the museum galleries are now closed for redevelopment, the reading room and gift shop are open, work behind the scenes continues, and a social media campaign is planned to keep the followers up to date with activities and project progress during the closure period. Although the museum galleries […]
Weekly What's on: Sat 25 to Fri 31 Oct
Archives and texts seminar series: Travels in a publisher’s archive: John Murray and nineteenth-century travel publishing Dr Innes M. Keighren (Geography, Royal Holloway) Monday 27 October 5-6pm Conference room, Museum of English Rural Life* For details of this seminar, read the latest post on the ‘Archives and Texts’ blog Our Country Lives display Saturday 25th to […]