The Museum of London, Monday, July 14th

The Museum of London is very close to the Barbican Center, yet somehow I missed seeing it last week.
The day's session started of with a lecture from Jon Cotton, the senior curator of pre-history for the London before London Gallery. According to Mr. Cotton, the Museum of London was designed in the 1960s and built in the 1970s. It contains main displays of the history of London and originated with the Guildhall Library (1825), which was a London museum set-up by a library committee. The Museum of London bills itself as the world's largest Urban history museum, which means the the museum specifically focuses on London as an urban settlemet, i.e., from the Roman's onward. Mr. Cotton, however, as a curator of pre-history, has the unique challenge of highlighting a history of London that is not even addressed in school curriculum, and making visitor's understand what "pre-history" means (i.e., the time before written records/recorded history). Additionally, because pre-history is relative and dependent upon the history of the written word in a specific culture/country, some cultures may be considered "pre-historic" as recently as the early 20th century. In other words, pre-history has nothing to do with dinosaurs, and everything to do with the recording of information, which, as an information professional, I am pretty interested in. As. Mr. Cotton noted, pre-historic people as just as intelligent and sentient as anyone else, they just did not archive their histories. That certainly does not mean that they were backward or intellectually inferior.
The museum is primarily visited by English-speaking foreignb tourists interested in England's colonization of the world. About 40% of visitors to the museum are foreign tourists, although there is no foreign language labeling. People visiit the museum for a variety of reasons. Some examples:
* To learn more about Vistorian/19th century (Dickensian) London
* The learn more about Tudor and Stuart London.
(Shakespeare and the 16th and 17th centuries)
* To learn more about Roman Londinium, the capital of Britannia

The suppose the focus of the trip, for me, at least, was in how the London Before London gallery displayed its information and exhibits. The current display is relatively new, having opened in 2002, and replaces the original gallery that opened in 1976 and was panel-dominated with lots of text and open display areas. The new gallery is very modern in appearnce, looking more like an art gallery than a history museum. The winding gallery is framed by the "River Wall" on the inside of the gallery, and the "Landscape Wall" on the far side of the room. In the center are low glass display cases, maps, interactive learning stations, quizzes and games. The River Wall is painted blue, and the Landscape Wall is earth-toned. As visitors follows the winding river and changing landscape, they are also following a timeline of artifacts and objects dredged from the river and dug-up from the earth that give insight into the pre-history of London.

I have to say, that I am very impressed with the trend toward modern presentation of information across the various sites in Britain that we've seen so far in this class. Pre-history could be very boring if presented in a dry manner. However, the dynamic presentation of this exhibit makes the subject interesting to even resistant learners (in my opinion, anyway). Although this is a museum, not a library, I think that we as librarians can learn a lot about breaking out of the traditional library role as a serious place of study, and use modern presentation techniques to make access to information mor (for lack of a better word) accessible to our patrons.