Building heritage infrastructure network: community, locality, and materiality in the museum storeroom

This network will explore how to create dynamic stored collections through community-led models of engagement and research to generate new knowledge and lines of interpretation while testing the boundaries of current curatorial and conservation practice. Reflecting the international nature of this challenge the network has been submitted by three heritage partners and two universities: the University of Westminster, the Science Museum Group, National Museums Wales, the Canada Science and Technology Museum (part of Ingenium) and the University of Reading. All three museum partners are moving their collections into new storage and developing strategies to increase audience engagement and participation with collections not on display. Further, each of the organisations share complementary collections around histories of science, technology, and industry as well as complex social history collections.