Librarianship

How does museum object handling affect wellbeing and recovery? Are patients in healthcare environments an appropriate audience for museums? Can the impact of handling sessions on patient wellbeing be measured? UCL Museums & Collections and University College London Hospitals have set out to answer these questions in the research project Heritage in Hospitals. With project partners, we are conducting research which for the first time will investigate the effect of handling museum objects on hospital patients’ wellbeing.

The project is a collaboration between the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Department of Classics at Cambridge to redisplay the Greek and Roman collections in the light of new research findings and scholarly approaches to the study of objects. The display will incorporate labels, panels, a map and timeline; there will also be a series of hand-held information boards for use in the gallery, which will introduce some of the underlying themes that can be pursued in various areas of the room.

The overriding aim of this project is to equip users of the existing web-based English Monastic Archives database with the expertise required to make the best use of the data that it structures. These records are of a volume and range that are unmatched in Britain save by the records of the Crown. In a previous project, an estimated 88% of the records were located and described, and the catalogue descriptions were made available on the internet. The present proposal seeks to build on that in three ways. 1.

This project will update, analyse and re-present three important collections of children's playground songs and rhymes: the Opie Collection of Children's Games and Songs, and selections from collections at the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition (NATCECT) and the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture (LAVC).