This month sees the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) and Reading Museum reach the midway point in a ground-breaking collaboration called ‘Reading Connections’.

This one-year Arts Council England funded project sees the museums working together to broaden their appeal to local communities by developing new online resources which will allow the public to freely access collections as never before.

Much of the preliminary work is concentrated on digitising and researching photographic material relating to Reading’s history since the mid-19th century.

In the Dann & Lewis and the Collier collections, MERL holds an extremely interesting group of photographs illustrating the town’s rapid development at the end of the 19th century. Combined with a catalogue of previously unseen photographs from Reading Museum’s collection, these will become an invaluable resource for people interested in their local history.b

Other collections to be featured relate to the theme of war and peace.

 

These will be central to the ‘Reading at War’ exhibition at Reading Museum planned for 2014 in commemoration of the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War.

The project’s other main focus is on Reading Museum’s ethnographic objects, known as the Historic World Object collection. These artefacts were gathered by local people during their travels abroad and therefore have local as well as international connections, which the museums aim to exploit in the future through participatory projects involving Reading communities.

 

The project funding has also allowed the museums to provide internship and employment opportunities for a number of young people embarking upon museum careers and over the next few weeks ‘Museum Watch’ will be featuring some of the discoveries they have made during the course of the research.
https://www.getreading.co.uk/lifestyle/nostalgia/museums-watch--reading-connections-6133305
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