While Mark, Stephen and all the technical guys at Newcastle University’s Digital Institute are all gearing up towards completing important phases of the website development, activity is increasing over at the museum aswell. Monday 6th August will see the beginning of a vital stage of the project- object photography. We have now picked out just over 1000 objects that will be highlighted for the Cutting edge project- alongside objects from collections belonging to the Society of Antiquaries and the Natural History Society of Northumbria, we will be using objects that have been kindly loaned to us from the Laing Art Gallery, Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens and Arbeia Roman Fort. These objects have now been packed up and shipped over to our two temporary photography studios based at the Great North Museum: Hancock and the GNM Resource Centre based at Discovery Museum.
Objects loaned to us from Tyne & Wear Archives and Museums ready for photography at the GNM Resource Centre, Discovery Museum.
Crates of Danish stone axes from Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens- not easy to move about by yourself…!
Good images are a must for any website, but as part of the Cutting Edge project is specifically about blade analysis, images of our prehistory and ethnographic objects will be a lot more detailed than usual.
These are interesting times for the curatorial and prehistory specialists on the Cutting Edge team. It’s always exciting to be able to conduct new research on collections, particularly on prehistory collections as these are often the types of objects that are often lacking in information. Hopefully when our new digital images are integrated into the website and used alongside all of the datasets that Mark has been incorporating, we may be able to look on our prehistory collections in an entirely new light.