QRator

Ipads in the Grant museum, to engage with the QRator website. Copyright Matt Clayton/UCL Grant Museum: copyright Matt Clayton/UCL Grant MuseumQRator is a collaborative project between the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH), UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), and UCL Museums and Collections,  to develop new kinds of content, co-curated by the public, museum curators, and academic researchers, to enhance museum interpretation. QRator enables members of the public to type in their thoughts and interpretation of museum objects and click ‘send’. They can do this either through ipads in the gallery space, or their web browser, or through twitter. Their interpretation become part of the objects history and ultimately the display itself via the interactive label system to allow the display of comments and information directly next to the artefacts.

the Qrator websiteQRator has demonstrated that the general public engage in complex debates surrounding artefacts in museums. It asks questions like "Do Animals Make Art?", "Can we lie about what a specimen is or where it came from?", "Should we only be conserving things that have a potential human benefit?". You Can see the responses to these and other questions at http://www.qrator.org/conversations/

Conversations on the QRator websiteThe technology is currently in place in the The Grant Museum of Zoology and the The Petrie Museum of Egyptology. Both are very small research museums at University College London.  The Grant Museum of Zoology is one of the oldest natural history collections in England, dating back to 1827. The collection comprises over 68,000 skeletal, taxidermy and wet specimens, covering the whole of the animal kingdom. Many of the species are now endangered or extinct including the Tasmanian tiger or thylacine, the quagga and the dodo. The Grant Museum is the only remaining university zoology museum in London. It is a very small museum, and has only one main gallery.