Catherine Hurcombe from the Regional Engagement team speaks to Caroline Walter, Interim Head of University of Exeter Special Collections, and Sarah-Jayne Ainsworth, Team Leader in Special Collections and Public Engagement Lead for the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, about their experiences of public engagement in the Heritage sector.
CH: Would you both like to introduce yourselves?
CW: I’m Caroline Walter. I’m interim head of heritage collections, so I look after the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum and the Special Collections.
SJA: I’m Sarah-Jayne Ainsworth. I’m team leader in Special Collections, and I take a lead on public engagement and outreach within both the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum and Special Collections.
CH: A big part of both of your roles is focused on engaging with – and encouraging others to engage with – the collections available at the university. Working at an academic institution, how does engaging with the public fit into that? What’s the significance of encouraging the public, as well as academics and students, into that space?
CW: There’s a certain element of it that is student recruitment, because today’s school children are the university students of the future. So a lot of the work that Sarah-Jayne does with schools will feed into recruitment to the university or recruitment to university in general. And obviously giving students who may not otherwise have engaged with such unique materials the chance to do so.
But equally, engaging with the public in general can spark additional research of our materials. What we’re trying to do currently is engage with more creative practitioners, because there are real opportunities there for interdisciplinary studies of how creative engagement can spark research projects, and how research projects can be distributed via creative projects.
SW: And also I think there’s still quite a lot of stigma. There’s quite a lot of separation of town and gown.
It is about that breaking down of barriers and raising of aspiration amongst the school kids. I had a school party on Wednesday who were completely gobsmacked. They arrived and said âwe’re not allowed to touch this sort of stuff!â And I said yes, you are! And they absolutely buzzed around looking at stuff from 1704, or whatever, and that’s what they take back; thatâs what they’re going tell their parents.
There are lots of complex webs as to how public engagement for us can feed into wider agendas within the university, and wider agendas within communities. Weâve got a really important part to play.
CH: A lot of it does come down to that awareness, doesn’t it? I know when I was a student, it all felt very new to me. I remember just sitting with a first edition of Dracula thinking, how is this allowed? How am I allowed to look at this?
How would you say this misinformation makes things more difficult? And how do you overcome these difficulties, and help bridge that gap?
CW: Unfortunately because of the nature of the materials we work with, we have slightly tighter security than walking into your general Public Library. And that can be quite forbidding for people, particularly if they’ve never engaged in that type of material before. So one of the things that came out of the most recent PER funding with the William Golding activities was that we tried to really take most of those activities out of the university. That’s something that is always a big barrier I think for people â not just physically in getting up the hill, but also feeling in a more comfortable space that they’re used to.
And that actually led to a really good increase. 48% of our audience for those events was new to special collections, so that was really lovely to see. As much as we love to see the same people time and time again, we also love to see new people starting to engage with the collections in different ways.
SJA: There’s lots of challenges that temper our ambition, but we keep trying. It’s also about letting people see that people who work in archives donât just sit behind a screen with leather patches on our elbows â we will be supportive and as accommodating as we can be.
CW: Thereâs still this weird idea of a librarian or Heritage professional as this person who says no, whereas realistically, we spend most of our time saying yes, please come!
CH: To finish off, what would your advice be to people looking to engage with the public in their work for the first time, particularly in the Library and Heritage sectors?
SJA: I think be realistic about what you can actually deliver, so look at your resources. I can think of a million things I’d love to do, but they’re not realistic.
Then use the strengths within your team because you may have people who have particular expertise or interests.
CW: Just take the opportunity as well to get as many different points of view in involved as possible. We’ve had students often involved in our work and they bring some really fresh ideas. Often someone can come in from a completely different background and go, have you ever thought of doing this?
SJA: We have to demonstrate that we’re really good value for money. And that’s why activities around student recruitment are really valuable, because we can potentially evidence this person came on that the day and they’ve gone on to higher education, and we contributed to that.
One to puzzle over, but this elusive âpublicâ â which doesnât exist, and we need to define and redefine what we mean by public â we need to engage them.