This looks like an interesting exhibition – and free to drop in too (subtitle same as a Maurice Rickards book from 1970)!
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Tag: Museum
Always good to see poster collections being digitised:
The U.S. government produced thousands of posters during World Wars I and II, urging citizens to buy war bonds, ration food, grow victory gardens, limit travel and avoid loose talk.
Now roughly 520 of those posters are available online, through Washington State University’s newPropaganda Poster Digital Collection.
Read full story, or read similar on Washington State University site.
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Propaganda Poster Museum, Shanghai
Maybe I will get to go there one day:
Communique No. 8: In China, communist propaganda has gone underground.In fact, the only place you can see idealized posters of Mao and his cadres of heroic workers building utopian communities is in a basement level museum tucked away in a nondescript apartment building in downtown Shanghai.The Propaganda Poster Museum is the private project of Yang Pei Ming, who supports this labor of love by selling admission tickets and gifts in this subterranean enclave of political nostalgia. If you leave your change, Yang will find you and return it.
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The Women’s Library
Call for the government to earmark funding for the Women’s Library:
Just over a decade ago, in early 2002, I attended the opening of the Women’s Library in Old Castle Street, East London, in a fine new building constructed on the site of some former wash houses. It was a wonderful event. Antonia Byatt, the library’s first director, gave an upbeat address, as did Tessa Jowell, who was culture minister at the time. Women and men from all sides of the political spectrum were there. The great and the good gladly rubbed shoulders with us lesser mortals, wine glasses in our hands. We all felt that at long last, this unique collection about women’s lives in the past and present had a proper home. That it all came about was due to a £4.2 million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the support of London Guildhall University, and (especially) the enormous efforts of a large number of people, including the Friends of the Library.
What a difference a decade makes. On 14 March this year, the board of governors at London Metropolitan University (formed in 2002 by the merger of London Guildhall and the University of North London) announced that the institution could no longer afford to maintain the Women’s Library, nor the Trades Union Congress Library, at a joint cost of approximately £1 million a year.
It was proposed that if by the end of December 2012 a new home, owner or sponsor of the Women’s Library could not be found, then opening hours would be limited to one day a week for a period of three years, with a further review after that. It was also decided that further investigation would be undertaken into the feasibility of constructing a lecture theatre within the library building to meet the demand on that campus for a medium-sized lecture space.
Read full story or visit The Women’s Library.
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Academic Lives @MassObsArchive
Academics are being invited to take part in a research project that is investigating the ways in which academics represent, share and change their teaching practices.
In a move inspired by the Mass Observation programme established in the 1930s, university teachers are being asked to keep a diary of their teaching on the 15th day of each month over the course of the next year, starting next week.
Sally Fincher, professor of computing education at the University of Kent and leader of the Share project, chose the novel way of collecting data after visiting the Mass Observation archives in Brighton.
“I’ve become increasingly aware of the limitations of traditional methods of gathering research data, such as questionnaires and semi-structured interviews which put the researcher into the frame,” she said.
The Mass Observation project, set up in 1937, used different methods. It aimed to record the lives of ordinary people in Britain via a panel of volunteer observers, creating what the founders described as “an anthropology of ourselves”.
Via “day surveys”, members of the public were asked to send in accounts of a day in their lives in the form of a diary.
Read full story, and letter in response.