Framework

The aims of the Sharing Museum Skills Millennium Award were:-

1. To set up an electronic catalogue of watercolour paintings of medieval tiles
2. Publication to set the collection in its national context
3. Provide access for local community and wider audience
4. To share skills between two institutions
5. Enhance educational experience at the Ashmolean, via Internet access
6. Identify new designs not in the national tile corpus
7. Develop new skills of the lead researcher at host museum, and
8. Satisfy personal interest in regional preferences in tile design

The Millennium Award has enabled the digital reunification of some 3,000 items of the divided archive into a single digital catalogue. This was achieved by secondment of the lead researcher, to the Worcester museum in a series of time blocks (six weeks in total).

The agreed mechanism was to give priority to scanning the tile paintings, so that security of record could be achieved as soon as possible by holding duplicate copies in the two institutions. In parallel with this Tim Bridges and Maureen Mellor collaborated on a paper setting the archive in its national context (Bridges and Mellor 2000, An archive of Paving-tiles in the Parker-Hore Collection, Worcester, and in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). The resultant article focused on the historiography of the collection, and biographical vignettes of Mrs Francis Parker and her granddaughter, Mrs Irene Hore (pictured right) and their wider family.

For the digital archive a recording field structure was agreed, and an appropriate database designed in Access format.

• Assembly tasks
• Evaluation of the Project
  • Community benefits to host museum: Worcester
  • Community benefits to the seconding museum: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
  • Educational ideas