Finds recording at the Museum of Liverpool. Copyright National Museums Liverpo: Attribution-ShareAlike License.
National Museums Liverpool will be carrying out essential internal works to the Museum of Liverpool, which will require the venue to be closed for a period of several weeks.
The Museum will therefore be closed from 31 December 2016 (closing at 5pm on Friday 30 December) and will re-open in late February 2017.
Background work including the work of the Finds Liaison Officer, Vanessa Oakden will be continuing as normal with finds being processed in the usual way. Appointments to record you finds and Treasure can be made by emailing vanessa.oakden@liverpoolmuseums.org.uk or by calling 01514784259.
More details on this temporary closure and works being carried out can be found here
Merseyside Maritime Museum. Copyright: National Museums Liverpool License: Attribution-ShareAlike License.
Merseyside Maritime Museum played host to the recent Portable Antiquities Scheme’s PASt Explorers’ conference on September 29th. The conference was a celebration of our volunteers with a variety of volunteer speakers discussing their experiences of volunteering with PAS. It was great to be able to listen to the experience of volunteers and to realise that it was so varied.
We had a wide variety of speakers including Liz Stewart who discussed volunteering at the Museum of Liverpool and Sophie Flynn who talked about her early experience in volunteering during college with me at the Museum of Liverpool and her return to volunteer here following university. It was lovely to hear how Sophie has valued her experiences and I have learned not to make her record so many musket balls!
Sophie Flynn discussing volunteering at NML. Copyright National Museums Liverpool: Attribution-ShareAlike License.
After lunch Christina Sanna discussed her experience as an Italian student on the Erasmus+ programme which allows EU students to spend one year in another EU country. Christina discussed her favorite finds and differences in heritage law between Italy and England. Following volunteering Christina has been able to become the Finds Liaison Assistant and has created 970 records so far.
Phil Harding was our next speaker, a metal detectorist and self-recorder from Leicestershire who has recorded a fantastic 2,500+ of his objects since 2010. Self-recording allows Phil “ownership and control” over his records allowing him to revisit his data helping him to leave a “small legacy of good quality data that can be excavated and interpreted in the future”. Phil is doing a fantastic job recording his finds and hopefully his experiences will encourage others to keep going when they are grappling with image editing!
Detectorist Phil Harding talking about self-recording. Copyright National Museums Liverpool: Attribution-ShareAlike License.
Following Phil we had Simon Nicholson an astronomer and teacher who following a stroke went to Derby museum to volunteer. Simon was placed with his local FLO and was thrown into the deep end with an introduction to Roman and then Medieval coins. This, Simon said, has given him “an ongoing education which is second to none” and he has now combined his hobbies of photography and walking to photograph the alabaster carved effigies abundant in Derbyshire. These effigies depict buckles, strap fittings and mounts which can be compared in date to the objects which we record and will be a really useful resource.
After the break we had three final speakers, Robert Hamer another self-recorder and detectorist followed by Roman and Medieval numismatists Matt Ball and Carl Savage discussing coins, their work helping to identify tricky coins for FLOs and their research using PAS data. The final talk of the day was Geoff Cook with a more modern but no less interesting talk on bullets and rifle ranges in the Lake District.
It was brilliant to learn how and why people volunteer and to end the day feeling inspired by the variety of experiences which people have and luckily for me following the conference I’ve two new volunteers starting next week!
