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By Tim Boon on

Research: Putting A Very Big ‘open’ Sign On The Door

Tim Boon on the launch of the new Research and Public History Department

At the end of last month, the Science Museum Group formally launched its new Research and Public History Department. Research is at the heart of every great museum; without it we cannot understand the stories our collections tell, how our audiences engage, or how to slow the deterioration of our objects.

BBC Horizon producers discuss the programme’s history at the Science Museum
Horizon producers discussing the programme’s history at a recent AHRC-funded event organised by the Research & Public History Department.

If research is so central, it may seem odd that we are having this launch now in 2012. And, of course, research has always had a role at the Museum. But what this launch signifies is a hunger to do more, in a greater variety of ways, and with an increasingly diverse range of partners.

Any scholar intrigued by the Museum’s collections, its galleries, or curious about the way that its galleries act as a public space for science and technology, is invited to work with us to delve deeper and to understand better; to research with us.

The BBC’s 2LO transmitter
The BBC’s 2LO transmitter, subject of a recently-completed AHRC-funded collaborative doctorate.

Ludmilla Jordanova, the eminent historian and Science Museum Group Trustee, argued at the opening event that, “it is fitting that a group of museums about ‘science’, which in many languages still has the broad meaning of knowledge and learning, should use and foster a wide range of approaches to understanding some of the most central phenomena of human existence, namely science in its more specific sense, medicine and technology.”

But what is research? Ludmilla suggested that it is ‘sustained nosiness’; that it is a kind of ‘systematic curiosity’. This definition gives a clue to that other phrase in our title, public history. At one level, academic research is simply a more intensive version of what all of us do when we visit a museum or gallery with a wish to understand more and better.

So, we are interested in how our visitors think about the history of science, and in developing insights that will enable us to attune our offer better. But we also know that the academics who work with us – historians, education experts, geographers, media scholars and many others – bring new and exciting ways of seeing from their own disciplines.

The research door is open; we encourage you to come in.