The National Trust recently made the details of over 700,000 of the objects in their care available online for the first time.
I quick search for objects around Birmingham reveals 1,350 items, a fair few of them with accompanying pictures.
You can check out the online collection at nationaltrustcollections.org.uk. If anyone spots anything particularly good in there, please let me know.
With thanks to Museum Network Warwickshire for pointing this one out.
It was good to see this list of favourite sites from BCT’s Leigh Walker. I’d not heard of a single one of them before so I’ll link them up from here too:
Head over to the Birmingham Conservation Trust website for why Leigh picked these.
If anyone else happens to do a list of their favourite Birmingham-centric websites then let me know – in the comments, by email or Twitter, take your pick. It’s always good to hear recommendations.
A collaboration between Balsall Heath Local History Society and MACE‘s ‘Full Circle’ Project. Digital Balsall Heath aims to:
record the life and times of people living in Balsall Heath and Highgate
Flagged up by the Friends of Moseley Road Baths.
To tie in with its Festival of History, which takes place at Kelmarsh Hall on 16 & 17 July, English Heritage have set up an historical GPS treasure trail around Birmingham city centre for Saturday 9th July. 
Here’s how it works:
Participants in the treasure trail will be given a set of starting co-ordinates to find using a mobile internet service or sat nav for a location with historic significance in Birmingham City Centre. When they go to the spot, they will find a costumed character with a historic link to the venue who will give them the location of the second clue and so on, until they have found four different re-enactors, each representing different periods of English history.
If you’re following the trail to find the fourth re-enactor, you’ll be entered into draws throughout the day to win family tickets to the Festival of History, which will feature re-enactments and things like a replica World War I trench, a medieval joust, and a Victorian travelling show.
The trail will be open for one day only, this Saturday 9th July, and the starting co-ordinates for the trail are 52.479433, -1.906933.
Celebrate African beauty and fashion as a part of Black History Month at Dress to Impress on 21 October at 6 – 8pm.
Hosted at National Trust’s Back to Backs, Nkem Nwachukwu will present a unique workshop, looking at different cultural ideas of beauty and explore the Back to Backs very own 1970′s Tailors Shop.
There are limited spaces, so call 0121 622 2442 to book your tickets, priced at £4.50 / £2 concessions.
I’ve often wondered why museums and galleries aren’t using their web presence in more innovative and useful ways. I worked within a gallery for a number of years, and this gave me the unsurprising insight that many factors contributed to this: underpaid overworked staff, simply no capacity (in terms of time) to explore new avenues, gallery staff restricted to working within strictly defined roles with little room for experimentation, and those who do maintain the web side of things being under supported and in need of upskilling. Plus above all, there are many challenges facing gallery collections (from conservation to valuation to interpretation and beyond) that the additional pressure of creating new ways of accessing that information sits at the bottom of anyone’s agenda, particularly when it could just end up as a copyright/intellectual property/Digital Rights Management nightmare.
Finally, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery have been brave enough to tackle these issues head on with the decision to publicly release their world-class Pre-Raphaelite collection, the largest in Europe, becoming the focal point for this work. With assistance from JISC, BMAG appointed Birmingham-based digital agency TAK! after a five way pitch to design and develop a website application to achieve their goal. And the resulting site is a beautiful, delicate and sensitive piece of design. Visitors will be able to access high quality content which will enable schools, universities, and the general public to have a greater understanding of the collection in their own time, and in their own space – which in turn could encourage new visitors and raise the profile of the museum.
“TAK! have helped us create the largest online Pre-Raphaelite collection in the world” concludes Linda Suprdle, Project Manager at BMAG. “It’s a fantastic resource and provides an unparalleled level of access and quality to the works on display. Anyone with an interest in art should visit the site and discover the importance of the Pre-Raphaelites.”
I hope that this project will encourage other museums and galleries to consider making their collections accessible online. They have the opportunity to create such valuable learning resources which could cross so many diversity and access barriers, and it seems a shame that the majority of artworks only ever see the light of day if and when a curator deems them relevant enough. Using online technology, all collections could eventually be available to view regardless of current exhibition theme!
If and when that does happen, I will be interested to see how the role of ‘the curator’ responds to that change. The Pre-Raphaelite collection site already encourages users to create their own personal collections, so how far a leap would it be for people to share those collections and reasons for their choices with other users? Imagine an itunes playlist or an amazon reading list – but for art, complete with personal interpretations, anecdotal thoughts, factual evidence and academic input. THAT would be something I could become obsessive about!
You wouldn’t know it from their own website (or at least I can’t find mention) but on bank holiday Monday, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery are offering
a rare opportunity to access the fascinating collections in store. This is no ordinary warehouse! It’s an Aladdin’s cave crammed to the rafters with every type of object you could imagine.
If you go, the good folk at The Big Picture (who flagged this up) would be keen for you to send them any pictures you take there.
The collection is at The Museum Collections Centre, 25 Dollman Street, Nechells, Birmingham B7 4RQ.
After many years of a lovely but slightly out of date website, Hunt Emerson has relaunched Large Cow where he’s selling artwork and archiving cool stuff from the past. Of particular note are pieces from the Birmingham Arts Lab which he was heavily involved with in the 1970′s such as this print:
There’s shockingly little online about the Birmingham Arts Lab other than a few mentions here and there. It’s be good if someone could write a decent history of it, or if one’s already written, stick it online and send me a pointer.
Harry Palmer’s Victorian Gentleman’s Toilet field trip looks to have been well attended judging by photos on Nikki Pugh’s blog.
As well as Harry’s initial report more pictures are promised in the next issue of the Eccentric City but if you come across any evidence online do leave a comment and I’ll post it here.
More stuff, to be added to as it comes my way.
Birmingham Mail covers the event. “Flushed with inspiration” indeed!
October 4th 1997 saw a performance by Higher Intelligence Agency and Biosphere, aka Bobby Bird and Geir Jenssen, on the 12th floor of the Rotunda entitled Birmingham Frequencies.
on this night, two hundred & fifty people went up into the rotunda for the first time, to hear a soundtrack by geir jenssen & bobby bird, made with location recordings taken from around birmingham over the previous week. visual impressions were also commissioned & projected on to the inner curve of the polo-mint shaped room.
the event was a follow-up / return invitation to an event two years previously, when hia / biosphere collaborated in a live concert overlooking tromso, norway as part of the polar music festival, a performance subsequently released as polar sequences.
A CD, with audio and video content, came out in 2004 and is available on eMusic (where you can listen to clips) and Amazon. I have ordered a copy!
Info came from my favourite American Anglophile Kevin Church.
John Akomfrah, whose 1986 directorial debut was Handsworth Songs about the fallout from the riots in Birmingham, collected his OBE last week for services to film. From the press release sent in by Pogus Caesar (who owns the photo above):
A founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective (1982-98), the legendary Black British film group, Akomfrah work has proved immensely influential on the evolution of black filmmaking in Britain and the USA, opening the way for many young black and Asian film makers to enter the film and television industries.
In 1987, Akomfrah won the coveted Grierson Award with his first film, the independently produced Handsworth Songs. Hailed as one of the most influential documentaries ever made and it garnered a range of International Awards. Handsworth Songs was also one of the first documentaries to be successfully released in British cinemas.
John is also a multi-award winning director with over twenty international film awards for his wide range of feature films, factual, programmes, documentaries and shorts covering a variety of musical icons such as Louis Armstrong, Goldie, Stan Tracey, Lauryn Hill. His films have also looked at inspirational black figures such as Martin Luther King , Kwame Nkrumah and Malcolm X.
John Akomfrah recently finished serving a six year term on the Governing Board of the British Film Institute; he is currently on the of Boards of both Film London and the London International Film School. He is also a Visiting Professor of Film at the University Of Westminster.
John saw a full retrospective of his work with the Black Audio Film Collective open at Foundation for Creative Technologies in Liverpool in February 2007. Designed by acclaimed architect and designer David Adjaye – architect of the new Nobel Prize Centre in Oslo – the Retrospective encompassed all the feature films and documentaries made by the collective screened in a specially designed gallery setting. The show received rave reviews in The Guardian and Frieze Magazine.
Continuing our trip down memory lane, and potentially starting a new series (“Nostalgia Thursday”?) here’s a video from 1985 just posted on the Surely? blog by Mark Murphy who’s not afraid to show his age.
I used to spend my Sunday afternoons in the dance studios at Birmingham’s (soon to be refurbished) mac. Hip Hop had landed and breakdancing with it. [...] Originally shot for use in sequences in a film about International Youth Year (1985), I have treasured this now fairly gnarly gem, a glimpse into the urban history of this city I call home.
There’s another clip of early beatboxing in that post and Mark promises more to come.
Meanwhile, here’s an amusing graphic found on the Wikipedia page for beatboxing (where I was checking it was actually called that. I make no pretentions here, though I am surprisingly good at it…) so you can have a go at home.
Any other historical gems, feel free to send them my way!
No, it’s not the after gig drinks of a Culture Club Tribute Band.
It’s the post premiere toasting of the film Handsworth Songs, now universally acclaimed as a documentary classic, after its world premiering in the Birmingham Film Festival in 1986 at The Triangle Media Centre (R.I.P.).
Yes, that’s the director, John Akomfrah, grinning madly, centre shot, goaded by Pogus Ceasar, of OOM Gallery fame with a skinny me, Festival Director, to the right of Pogus.
Thanks Roger!
Spotted on the Punch Records site – a new-ish book about Bhangra by Birmingham-born academic Dr Rajinder Dudrah, senior lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the University of Manchester.
Bhangra music is a genre that comes from the Indian subcontinent and sung in Punjabi. Bhangra: Birmingham and Beyond traces its birth in the UK to when migrant workers from the Indian subcontinent and East Africa arrived in the country in the 1960s, many settling in West Midlands areas such as Birmingham.
Along the way, we learn how stars such as Heera, Alaap, Premi and Malkit Singh stamped their influence on the scene, paving the way for fresh UK based talent such as Apache Indian, Bally Sagoo, Juggy D, Sukshinder Shinda amongst many others, to follow in their footsteps and become successes in their own right.
Priced at £15 you can hopefully find it in the local bookshops or from Amazon. And if you’re in Manchester this weekend there’s a Q&A at the Deansgate Waterstone’s from 12-3pm.
Here’s a selection of colour slide photographs of Birmingham in the 1960s taken by Phyllis Nicklin, then the Staff Tutor in Geography at the University of Birmingham. I picked out three but there are many more. Have a look before we get to the meat of the matter. (Click for bigger.)
Anderton Street terraces, Ladywood, 1968
Little Anne Street / Milk Street, 1953
Bull Ring, 1959
According to the site (and D’log‘s research), Nicklin died in 1969 leaving thousands of slides taken for her classes. 450 of these were scanned and released online in 2004/5 as part of the “Chrysalis” project from the West Midlands Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. This project, and the website, seems to be firmly defunct and offline. So the only record we have of these photos (which, you’ll note, were “kindly made available to down-load and redistribute for non-commercial research or private study purposes” by the University) is an unauthorised gallery from Keith Berry who was wise enough to take some copies.
So where are these photos? I’d imagine someone is working in some department where there’s a CD with them on. If they are licensed to be made available it shouldn’t be hard to throw them up on Flickr or similar. Hell, I’ll do it if you post me the disc. Or you could contact The Big Picture – they’re looking for old photos of Birmingham as well as contemporary ones.
[Update: Thanks to Dave Harte in the comments it looks like all 450-odd are here. Yay!]
Above all this is an important lesson about the sustainability of funded online projects, not just about the need to keep them online but that passion is an important part of the process. There must be a middle ground to be found here between those with the means and those with the will.
