About Moving Here

RAMM’s Moving Here project ended in March 2011. It involved talking with people who have moved to Exeter and recording their views on objects in the museum collections.

Moving Here gave participants the chance to become more familiar with RAMM by meeting our curators, discovering our collections and finding out how we look after them. For the museum, it was a great opportunity to see our objects through different eyes, reflecting the communities in our city.  

Bringing people together to talk and share

RAMM reaches out to community groups from a wide range of backgrounds, inviting everyone to get to know objects in our collections and comment on them. The Moving Here project did not expect people to be experts, but gathered fresh perspectives, ranging from cultural knowledge to immediate impressions of an object, from personal memories to parallels between places and times.

Adding to the museum catalogue

Participants’ comments were written down or recorded and are being published in our online collections database of museum objects. The database – which is open to the public as well as researchers – contains information about each object, such as its age and where it was made. At the moment, most of this is written by museum curators. The additional information collected through the project helps to build up knowledge and new points of view about the objects, which can be used by researchers or for museum exhibitions in the future.

Exhibitions

Some of the comments collected carefully during Moving Here, and beautiful photographs of the people who made them, went on display around Exeter during 2011. ‘From Devon to Delhi’ was shown at various venues, including the PictureHouse Cinema and the Royal Devon & Exeter Hospital.

Working with the BBC and the Collections Trust

Comments collected during Moving Here were published as part of the the BBC’s highly successful A History of the World in 100 Objects radio programme. Moving Here’s curator also wrote a Community Pick feature for the BBC website.

The methodology used during Moving Here was based on Revisiting Collections, which was devised by the Collections Trust, a national body which aims to make collections available to everyone and keep high professional standards in this field. OpenCulture, a Collections Trust blog, published a guest feature about Moving Here.

For further information about this project, please contact Ruth Gidley, Community Engagement Officer, on 01392 665305 or email [email protected]