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17 December 2010

One exhibition, two museums

Tuesday = seminar day, and this week it happened in central London. First to the British Library for the Evolving English exhibition - many things of interest, with informative but not overwhelming labels, and low lighting (difficult for seeing) and also auditory input, not always through headphones. Quite a challenging situation for a group going round, sharing what they found of interest about "their" object (we each chose one). Later we headed to a less crowded place to have a general discussion -
Then a walk, including lunch, to the afternoon's venue.
On one side of Lincoln's Inn Fields is Sir John Soane's Museum, crowded with an 18th century gentleman's cabinet of curiosities.
On the other, the Royal College of Surgeons and its Hunterian Museum, with its glass atrium and hundreds of specimens in glass jars.
Our task was to look at the idea of the collections, the role of labels, the display of objects, and "how do the display systems inform the audience's relationship to the objects and contextualise the meaning".

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