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.

• Photo by D J Norton
• Old Maps
• Austin Memories
• A History of Birmingham places and Placenames
• The Lapal Canal Project

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.

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!

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.

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!

Harry has a Flickr stream.

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.