1. Museum Lives Oral History and the Natural History Museum Nadja Noel

2. Curators, Collections and Collections Databases “The longer you’re here, the thing you realise is that these are not just objects, they’re peoples’ lives.”

3. Knowledge is leaving the NHM 5 Years 24 Specialist Staff 774 Years of Knowledge

5. … Human interest not just science exhibition displays Working at the NHM Key scientific discoveries Ollie Crimmen and his Speedos River Thames whale stranding London Blitz

6. The Project Plan Archive-research for humanities academics. Enriching collections data in EMu Online resource Public offer Year 1 Planning Training Copyright Year 2 Interviews Editing Web design Year 3 Interviews Short films Web dev

7. Oral History and Film

9. Project Delivery- What worked…and what didn’t

10. Digital Asset Management There’s a lot of it…………

11. Digital Asset Management and some more…………

12. Still more…

13. Documentation and workflows Rights Interview scheduling Editing Content authorisation Asset management Web publication Review

14. The Content-Why its worth it PeopleThe object The location The story

15. Why was EMu used? Repository for interpretation No dept-centric boundaries Familiarity with interface Close association with specimen/collections information Integrated digital asset support

16. Sustainable documentation Align project with current procedures Training Don’t add a burden for future users Communicate with technical partners What happens when things break? Abstraction between data & presentation

17. Challenges Difficulties of extracting tacit knowledge Production standards Managing digital assets-costs!

18. New Possibilities The collections database Public Offer Legacy

19. Plan B

22. Questions?