About Exploring 20th century London
About the project
Exploring 20th Century London tells the diverse stories of London and Londoners thoughout the 20th century as seen in c.7000 objects. These objects include paintings by C.R.W. Nevinson and photographs by Roger Mayne and Henry Grant. The site also displays objects such as a large collection of suffragette ephemera, the Selfridges lift, an Olympic torch and an Acid House party flier.
Four museums, one website
Exploring is an ongoing partnership project that started in April 2004. Four museums; the Museum of London, London’s Transport Museum, Croydon Museum and Heritage Service and the Jewish Museum have amalgamated object records and images on the integrated website, http://www.20thcenturylondon.org.uk/. The project was managed by the Museum of London on behalf of the partner museums.
Access to 20th century collections
Exploring 20th century London provides access to 20th century collections which are seldom on display. At the Museum of London for example there is currently no 20th century gallery. Therefore many of the objects seen on the website are being seen in public for the first time.
Museums as containers of ideas and memories
The website also demonstrates that museums hold culture and ideas as well as objects. Oral history recordings allow users to hear real people's voices as they talk about their personal experiences of London in the past.
About this site
This microsite is part of the main Museum of London website. It shows the c.3100 Museum of London objects chosen for the Exploring project; these form part of the material on the integrated site.
Searching
There are many ways of finding out about the objects from the Museum of London collections chosen for the Exploring project. One way is via the Catalogue page. Here you can chose a borough and/ or a decade and/ or a subject that you are interested in.
Alternatively you can browse the material via Theme, which groups the objects by subject matter; or via the interactive map of London boroughs, which sorts the objects by location, or the clickable timeline which groups them by the decade in which they were made.
Essays
Included in the website are interpretative essays on each of the following elements as a way of placing the objects in a broader context.
- 15 Themes, Art and Design; Cityscape etc.
- 32 London boroughs
- 10 decades in the interactive timeline
- c.200 information records including subjects and events
Games page
There is an interactive games page exploring Museum of London objects unique to this site.
How we did it
Funding
Exploring 20th century London is an MLA flagship project and one of the key strategic regional programmes for the London Hub. The first phase of the project was jointly funded by the MLA Designation Challenge Fund and the London Museums Hub, http://www.mla.gov.uk.
The technical delivery
The technical delivery of the project involved IT and Documentation staff from all four partner museums. They worked together to create standardised data from the four different databases that delivered the project’s aims. This data was sent to the Peoples Network Discover Service (PNDS) where it was combined into one database. This was available to the project’s own content management system, Amaxus from BoxUK.
This content management system then joined the data with its associated image and media files, before publishing them all in a readable form on the website. Although the PNDS has been live since October, Exploring 20th century London is the first project to use this national infrastructure as a way of aggregating and then publishing data to multiple websites.
What's next
The integrated site launched on 25 September 2006. This first phase is a pilot project and involves the development of new partnerships and working practices that will act as a model for future projects, not just in the London region.
The London Museums Hub has pledged more financial support for the project for 2006/2007 and phase II will see the further development of site to include more partners (possibly archives and libraries) and a specially designed section of the site for children.
