Earlier this year, Axiell customer the British Film Institute (BFI) was selected as one of 10 pilot museums for the Sensational Museum Project. Here, the BFI’s Louise McAward-White and Jennifer MacMillan give us an overview of the project, from understanding multi-sensory data, to looking at ways they can make their system more accessible.
The Sensational Museum is an interdisciplinary research project rethinking the role of senses in museums, looking at how to make the museum experience less sight-centric – using what we know about disability to change how museums work for everyone.
Strand A of the project is reimagining how Collections Management Systems, like Axiell Collections, deal with data. We will test multi-sensory ways of working with collections records using prototype resources and tools, giving feedback on how they work and how they fit with existing working practices and promote new ones.
The BFI first heard about the Sensational Museum project in the chat at Axiell Digital Days 2023. CID Specialist (and Axiell Collections User Group Co-Chair) Jennifer Macmillian volunteered to be interviewed about how Collections Management Systems could be altered to include more multi-sensory data. After the interview, she was asked to participate further and attended a User Interface workshop.
Jennifer reflects here on her experience at the workshop:
“In the workshop, we decided on exploring three areas: our understanding of multisensory data; ways we can improve the accessibility of the systems we work with; and mapping out the types of data we can include to make collections more accessible.
“You may think that first and third one sound pretty similar, but it’s the difference between including multisensory data about scent or texture, and including access metadata like audio descriptions or image identifications.
“I came away from this workshop buzzing with ideas, and firmly convinced that we need to embed multisensory data and access metadata into practice – recording that which is already encountered in the course of archival activities, and creating easy, sustainable routes for recording newer data concepts.”
Since the announcement of the pilot partners, we have hosted Dr Sophie Vohra from the project at the BFI National Archive, where we were pleased to show her around to understand how the archive works, the breadth and depth of our collections and how we can work together to get the best for us and the project.
We are particularly excited to be the only moving image collection in the pilot museums; as watching film and TV is an inherently sensory experience. We’re also looking forward to thinking about what sensory data might mean for us at BFI – sensory interactions with objects; and how our collections space sense related data could be recorded e.g. lighting, temperature, heights and sounds in stores, and how this data relates to a space being accessible.
We are looking forward to talking more about our experiences and sharing what we learn that others could use, and what Axiell could consider for their collections management systems in future, as the project develops through 2025.
Find out more about The Sensational Museum
The Sensational Museum is a research project radically re-thinking the role of senses in museums.
A £1M project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), this interdisciplinary project will design and create sensory interventions that are accessible to all – using what we know about disability to change how museums work for everyone.
Find out more – https://sensationalmuseum.org/
