Making Our Connections: Collaboration, Community and the Exhibition of the Written Word

The project explored how communities of interest are constituted, and how the projects exhibition must appeal to them if it is to meet its goals. The project team, consisting of librarians, curators and academics, brought together academics, librarians, curators, conservators, community engagement officers, and representatives of writer-focused heritage institutions and societies working in Scotland and beyond, all of whom have an existing interest in engaging a varying public with the written word. The team organised a Knowledge Exchange Workshop bringing 20 participants in the workshop including academics, curators and other stakeholders engaged in the conservation, interpretation and display of manuscripts and printed books, in which they shared views, assumptions and experiences, and formulated provisional conclusions, regarding the ends and means of public or community engagement around the exhibited text. The discussions that took place at the workshops were formulated into an advisory document 'Making our Connections' which was distributed in hard copy to academics, curators and other stakeholders via the Rare Books in Scotland network and the distribution networks established by Edinburgh UNESCO World City of Literature. It is also available as a downloadable PDF on a project webpage created on the University of Edinburgh website. The principal outcome of the project is enhanced and extended knowledge exchange regarding the theoretical and practical issues, assumptions and problems involved in exhibiting texts to a range of communities of interest. The Workshop was the principal venue for this; but the project outputs - an advisory document and a training workshop for academics, curators and other interested parties - also enabled the team to formalise this exchange and disseminate it to other interested academics, curators, heritage bodies, government supported services and voluntary societies.