We’re thrilled to say that we’re going to be in action again soon – and at one of our home bases, the National Railway Museum.
We’re giving a presentation as part of the ‘Museums in Context & Partnership’ conference, organised by the ‘Railway Cultures’ project (a project which, as you can imagine, our project is very interested in!). It’s taking place on 19-20 April, with our presentation on the 2nd day, which focuses on the links between universities and museums.
The purpose of the conference is to promote discussion and share best practice, so we’re excited to have been selected to take part, and we’re looking forward to the opportunity to discussing our work with everyone at the conference. We think it’ll be a real two-way flow, and it’ll be really helpful to us to find out more about what other collaborative projects are doing and how they’re achieving their aims. We’re particularly keen on the fact that as part of the process of proposing a presentation, we were asked to include some questions we’d like to pose to participants at the conference – so important that this isn’t just a lecture from us to them, but a conversation where we can all learn from each other.
At the conference our presentation will be made by our University of Portsmouth and NRM leads, Mike Esbester and Peter Thorpe – it was really important to us that, as a collaboration, we were both involved. We’ll be discussing how the project has worked and how we’ve been engaging with all sorts of audiences beyond ‘just’ museums and universities – including, of course, family historians and genealogists, plus the current rail industry. And we’ll be posing questions to everyone there based around the practicalities of crowd-sourcing and volunteer work and how we deal with difficult pasts like accidents.
The event is free, so if you can get along it would be great to see you: do come and make yourselves known to us!
Further details to follow here and on Twitter (@RWLDproject) when they’re available, but for now, save the date!