Folklore & Storytelling: MERL and the Pitt Rivers Museum
Ollie Douglas, our Assistant Curator, gave a gallery talk at the Pitt Rivers Museum recently and naturally homed in on objects relating to rural life. Here’s what he found… I recently had the enjoyable experience of giving a gallery talk at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, on the subject of folklore and object collecting. […]
Chocolate box images & perceptions of the countryside
Alison Hilton, Marketing Officer, shows how, with a little bit of research, it is possible to link chocolate and English Rural Life, and invites you to come and talk about your perceptions of the countryside at our first Our Country Lives Information Day on Sat 4th October. Staff and volunteers spent last weekend on the […]
Inspiring Creativity with Objects: Collections-based activities for families
During her time at MERL as Public Programmes Manager, covering maternity leave, Phillippa Heath has introduced some some great new workshops enabling families to get closer to our collections. In this post, Phillippa looks at how the positive reaction to the new sessions will influence our future planning for families… Whenever we plan a family […]
Our Boneshaking connection to cycling
Written by Adam Koszary, Project Officer. At the moment of writing, 198 lycra-clad men from across the world are cycling through the Cambridgeshire countryside. They’re riding the best bicycles in the world (with the best thighs in the world), aiming for a finish line at Buckingham Palace, the prize of a yellow jersey and a […]
Our Country Lives update: How we research
written by Adam Koszary, Project Officer. You may have noticed that we’ve been a bit quiet recently about our HLF-funded redevelopment project, Our Country Lives. This is because we’re waiting for a response from the Heritage Lottery Fund due on June 13th (fingers crossed), but also because a lot of us have been busy catching […]
Collections Based Research opportunities
There are currently several opportunities to work and study with the University of Reading’s museums and collections: Collections Based Research Programme Director We are seeking an outstanding candidate to be responsible for the formulation, development and delivery of a strategic programme of University of Reading (UoR) collections-based research (CBR). Please see the University website for details of this […]
Press release: Science Week is a riot at Uni Museum
Volunteers at the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) will present a Reading Science Week event with a difference on Saturday 22nd March. Reading Science Week is part of National Science and Engineering Week (NSEW), a ten-day national programme of science, technology, engineering and maths events and activities across the UK aimed at people of […]
Research tip #4: Confused by codes?
Confused by codes? All archives use reference codes to identify their collections, files and individual documents. These are often confusing, even for the archivists, but they are necessary to help us find things quickly and to make sure that items don’t get lost. Sometimes codes are completely meaningless, sometimes they can help to guide you […]
Project news: Rural images discovered: Colin Shaw
written by Nancy Fulford, Project Archivist. A couple of weeks ago marked the end of the Rural Images Discovered Project which has seen over 15,000 prints digitised, and many more negatives and prints catalogued from the John Tarlton, Farmers Weekly, Peter Adams and Colin Shaw photographic collections. I came to the Colin Shaw collection towards the […]
The MERL Classification – what it is and why we’re updating it
Project Officer, Greta Bertram, explains more about the work she has been doing to revise the MERL Classification over the last few months. Classification systems are used by museums to organise data about their collections. The MERL Classification was devised by John Higgs, the first Keeper at MERL, in the 1950s. It was based on […]