Dynamic Collections

Thanks to Lottery players, a grant of £250,000 from the National Lottery Heritage Fund’s Dynamic Collections scheme is helping to transform our understanding of the collections in our care, improve their storage conditions and increase access.

The funding is enabling us to better document, research and interpret more than 20,000 objects, archives, photographs and films. The project staff  – Collections Manager Carson Murphy and Documentation Officer Rebecca Bennion – are working with a new volunteer team to audit the collections, checking the condition of every item as a first step in understanding what will be needed in the longer term.

Do you know what this is or how it was used? Please let us know!

The project is called ‘New Views of North Craven‘ and local residents are invited to join us to create a ‘Community Catalogue’. You can get involved for as long or short a time as you wish, helping to add more detailed information about items in the collection that interest you, or that have a family connection. We are keen to find out the identities of people in historic photos and to record people’s memories of making or using some of the everyday objects in the Museum that tell the stories of life in our area, from fossils to farm implements. We are also planning an oral history project, so that we can record why it was important to the donors that these items should be preseved for future generations of visitors to enjoy.

We are exploring ways to make our catalogue available online, so that we can improve public access to information about our collections.

If you would like to find our more or volunteer to be part of this exciting project, please contact us.