Museum Libraries and Archives Group Meeting
Royal Museums Greenwich
Friday 19 June 2015
10:30
Attendees:
Antony Loveland (British Museum) - Chair
Mark Glancy (National Museums Scotland) – Secretary
Penny Allen (Royal Museums Greenwich)
Jane Bramwell (Tate)
Sally Brooks (Museum of London)
Martin Flynn (V&A)
Melanie Grant (Wellcome Trust)
Jonathan Franklin (National Gallery)
Antony Hopkins (Courtauld Institute of Art)
Chris Mills (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew)
Helen Pye-Smith (National Archives)
Fergus Read (Imperial War Museum)
Caroline Warhurst (London Transport Museum)
Nick Wyatt (Science Museum)
Apologies:
Kristine Chapman (National Museum Wales)
Alan Crookham (National Gallery)
Eleni Papavasileiou (SS Great Britain Trust)
Hellen Pethers (Natural History Museum)
Hannah Rausa (Natural History Museum)
Joseph Ripp (National Portrait Gallery)
Julie Robertshaw (Imperial War Museum)
Mel Smith (Natural History Museum)
Adam Waterton (Royal Academy)
AGENDA
1. Welcome, introductions and apologies
Thanks to Penny for hosting the meeting
2. Minutes of last meeting
There were two changes to the minutes: Jonathan Franklin has been added to the list of
attendees and his institution changed to National Gallery.
3. 2015 Conference debrief
The Chair thanked Mel for hosting the conference at Wellcome. The general feeling of the
meeting was that the conference had been very successful, with a good variety of speakers
and the format of the day worked really well. Feedback from the delegates was
overwhelmingly positive. The posters also got a good response – the conservation team at
Wellcome sent out e-mails to interested delegates who wanted to know more about their
digitisation policy.
There was a wide range of attendees, including some from HE. This is MLAG’s fourth
conference and once again it attracted nationwide participation.
For the next conference (2017), we will need to find a venue that can afford to host it, as the
costs this year were £4k. The main potential cost is for the hire of the space – there was a
suggestion to possibly look at using “dead time” when there are no other events on and use
the conference to promote the work of the host institution. The ticket sales for the
conference raised £2k which went towards the catering.
Action: The results of the survey are to be distributed and Mel to forward follow-up e-mails
to add to the survey feedback.
4. Social media update
Hellen sent in an MLAG Twitter update
The D Word conference proved to be hugely successful for @MLAGuk We started the day
on 120 followers and to date we now have 196!!!
Due to the conference being SO popular the lecture theatre filled up so much, that early on I
gave up my seat for a delegate and spent the whole event at the back on the extremely plush
Wellcome carpet. This was the first time that I have ever tweeted live at an event and it was
thoroughly enjoyable, if exhausting!
In the end I tweeted over 160 times, this also included retweeting tweets made by others in
the room and also some from outside who were following the event using the hashtag
#MLAG15
Here is our Storify capturing the tweets http://sfy.co/p0O4u
5. MLAG Membership
Membership was discussed at the meeting and the general feeling was that MLAG should be
as welcoming a group as possible. The Museums Association definition should be the
starting point for eligibility, but being accessible to the public is also an important factor.
Social media should be exploited to advertise membership.
Action: Mark and Antony to work on the definition of a membership for the next meeting.
6. MLAG Strategic Plan
The meeting felt that the Strategic Plan should be replaced with a Mission Statement with 4
or 5 strategic objectives.
Ideas for those objectives were:
 Half-day seminars on specific topics of interest
 Bi-annual conference
 Increasing membership
 Developing our communication
 Providing an informal support network for study for those wishing to become
professional librarians/archivists
 Half-day shadowing or visits for staff in MLAG institutions
 Staff exchanges
 Linking with other specialist groups (e.g. Rare Book Group, ARLIS and the Scottish
Visual Arts Group – who both already have an MLAG rep)
Future MLAG meetings will look at these objectives and activities in more detail to bring them
together into a Strategic Plan or Mission Statement.
The strength of MLAG was felt to be its informality and this should be retained, particularly as
it has no budget and relies on the goodwill of its members to meet its objectives.
7. Next meeting – December 2015 (Science Museum)
Date to be confirmed, tour of new Research Centre
There had been the option of asking Ged Welford to do a demonstration of Oxford University
Press resources that potentially could be added to the MLAG portfolio via JISC Collections,
but the bundles were not seen as appropriate by the MLAG members who had trialled them
so we will not be progressing this.
8 Date, venue and themes of future meetings
There are no plans for a September meeting.
Museum of London can host the March 2016 meeting.
National Museums Scotland can host the June 2016 to coincide with the opening of the new
art and design and science and technology galleries.
9. Library and archive updates from members
British Museum - Antony Loveland
The Anthropology Library staff met with representatives from OCLC and had a presentation
on their new Worldshare suite of services. The presentation concentrated on the front-end
interfaces, so a follow-up presentation on the management tools has been arranged for
October 1st. I also took part in a workshop at the Museum which looked at Google Search
Appliance. It is a Google product which allows for the simultaneous searching of multiple
datasets within your organisation. It is searchable via a single interface and presents the
user with a set of combined search results. It is a highly configurable, powerful tool.
If deployed, it could potentially do much to raise the profile of the library catalogue.
The Indigenous Australia exhibition is performing very well and planning for a South Africa
exhibition is now underway.
The Museum’s Director, Neil McGregor, will also be stepping down. A process to appoint
his successor is in train and it is likely to be a completely open competitive process.
Courtauld Institute of Art - Antony Hopkins
Courtauld are tendering for a Current Research Information System (CRIS) which publishes
and makes accessible the research the Institute is doing. All this will be completed in time for
the HEFCE deadline of April 2016.
Courtauld Connects will not only make The Courtauld more accessible to the public but also
make our use of the space we occupy in Somerset House more efficient and connected.
Imperial War Museum - Fergus Read
Staffing has been restructured with 5 library posts lost and now a complement of 6.5 FTE.
This has meant the ending of the collections enquiries service and reduced hours for front of
house activity by specialist staff. Explore History is open just 5 hours on weekdays, and now
closed at weekends; the Research Room is open Mondays to Thursdays (now closed
Fridays). However the proposal to charge researchers for access has been dropped.
Income will be sought by use of chargeable permits allowing readers to make digital copies
at their desks.
Major collections reviews continue – in the Library this is identifying duplicate and irrelevant
material for exit; the Journals holdings are likely to be significantly reduced.
London Transport Museum - Caroline Warhurst
The library was involved in the research for the Hidden London initiative (tours of old tube
stations etc.)
Museum of London - Sally Brooks
There are plans to move the Museum of London to Smithfield Market and an architectural
competition will be announced.
The Sainsbury’s Archivist at the Museum of Docklands has left and the post will be
advertised shortly.
National Gallery - Jonathan Franklin
2 cataloguing projects underway: a retro conversion, typing in the details of the scientific
library book collection from catalogue cards, now complete; and a rare books cataloguing
project, continuing. Conversion of the sheaf catalogue of 70,000 items, only about 10% of
which is on the automated catalogue, is being investigated.
The National Archives - Helen Pye-Smith
The recent Archives at Night event attracted 140 people. The Magna Carta event had 120
schoolchildren in attendance. Looking at re-jigging the spaces, including the library but no
progress yet.
National Museums Scotland - Mark Glancy
The post of Head of Information Services has officially been deleted and the department is
being realigned with the Library Services team moving to the Collections Services
Department and the Information and Knowledge Management team moving to the
Directorate of Planning and Finance. These changes will take effect from October 2015.
Mobile shelving in one of the cellars has been extended to provide over 900 linear metres
and half of the book stock has been transferred onto the new shelving.
The library has just subscribed to the Berg Fashion Library under the JISC MLAG deal to
support the curators in their research for the new Fashion and Style gallery.
Current exhibitions:
Photography: a Victorian sensation (19th June – 22nd November)
The exhibition includes two items from our special collections which were presented to the
Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1851: an album of 110 salt prints made by the calotype
process by Hill and Adamson and an album of salt prints made by the calotype process from
the world’s earliest photographic society: the Edinburgh Calotype Club.
Fully fashioned: the Pringle of Scotland story (to 16th August)
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew - Chris Mills
The Library, Art & Archives department is now in the Public Programmes Directorate. The
library has received 9 grants in the past 6 months, including a further 2 years for the Joseph
Hooker Personal Correspondence project. 3 new posts have been sponsored including one
for the art gallery which can now open again full-time from September.
Chris will be retiring at the end of October and the post will be advertised shortly.
Royal Museums Greenwich - Penny Allen
Caird Library and Archive are holding an open day on June 27th.
The reading space is being reconfigured including the service desk.
There is a project to index periodicals to assist with the retrieval of images.
In partnership with the National Archives, the National Maritime Museum has created a
database of the 1915 crew lists in their collection. Customers can now search 39,000 crew
lists, featuring over 750,000 names transcribed by almost 400 volunteers over 4 years.
http://1915crewlists.rmg.co.uk/
Science Museum - Nick Wyatt
The builders are in the Research Centre and the dates for opening are still the same as
before. The new LMS has been selected and Nick can share the tender details: questions to
the vendors, system requirements – MUSCOW (Must/Should/Could/Want) and the
evaluation procedure. The contract has yet to be signed so the name of the new LMS
cannot be released yet.
There has been an ad for a new paper conservator. The new Archive Manager is in place –
they are using ADLIB as the archive management system. Two new Research Centre
assistants have been appointed.
The next exhibition is Cosmonauts – featuring 150 objects from Russia.
Tate - Jane Bramwell
The new Tate Modern building has undergone impressive progress in recent months and is
due to open in 2016 – opening date yet to be confirmed.
Penelope Curtis, Director of Tate Britain will be taking up the position of Director at the
Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon in the autumn.
The Archives and Access digitisation project will see the remainder of the 52,000 images
published online by August.
As part of the ongoing Archives and Access project, Tate will be the first fine arts
organisation to collaborate with the Zooniverse team led by the University of Oxford to
crowdsource full text transcriptions of handwritten documents. The Zooniverse is home to
the Internet's largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects. Zooniverse
(traditionally more science based) is branching out into the humanities and have teamed up
with Tate to create “AnnoTate”, a project centred on the lives and letters of twentieth-century
artists whose works are housed at Tate. It is anticipated that the project will be launched in
early August 2015.
V&A - Martin Flynn
Digitisation of nineteenth century V&A publications held in the National Art Library (NAL) has
begun. The NAL create simple PDFs and supplies these to the Internet Archive who create
the OCR and page-turning functionality and then host the e-books free of charge and the
titles are available on their website (https://archive.org/) and they also provide download
figures for material on their website.
Wellcome Trust - Melanie Grant
Currently recruiting for a Head of Research and a Head of Digital.
10. AOB
Date of next meeting to be held at the Science Museum to be confirmed.