blue zone


 

The library has a reasonable collection of books on museums and heritage, all of which would be worth a browse. Here is a selection:

  • Hooper-Greenhill, E., 1994, Museums and their Visitors, Routledge.
  • Hooper-Greenhill, E., 1994, Museum and Gallery Education, Leicester University Press.
  • Hooper-Greenhill, E., 1999, Museum, Media, Message, Routledge.
  • Macdonald, S. and Fyfe, G., 1996, Theorising Museums, Blackwell. This collection of papers looks at a range of problems which surround the seemingly simple idea of representing the past.
  • Sherman, D. and Rogoff, I., 1994, Museum Culture. Routledge. A very difficult read; but if you wish to free, radically, your thoughts on representing the past, then this is the book for you.
  • Lowenthal, D., 1985, The Past is a Foreign Country, Cambridge UP. An encyclopedic look at the 'heritage mania' which swept Britain and the US in the 1980's, and an attempt to understand its cultural roots. You can use this book to provide an interesting repertoire of 'routes back to the past', since he deals in great detail with how and why we try and recover aspects of the past.
  • Lowenthal, D., 1997, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, Cambridge UP. An alternative 'take' on the above. This book is very critical of 'heritage dross', and would be a useful read if you are trying to produce an alternative 'take' on an established heritage attraction.
  • Taylor, J., 1994, A Dream of England, Manchester UP. This book meditates on heritage and the construction of the past from a visual perspective - the author lectures on photography. He looks at the ways in which our repertoire of photographic evocations of England's past has been built up. He also considers ways of subverting and inverting establised images.
  • Wells, L., 1997, Photography: A Critical Introduction, Routledge. This book can be used as a complement to Taylor's; it is a more tutorial look at the way in which styles of representation become established. See especially the chapter on commodity culture.

There are a vast number of multimedia heritage sites on the web, and the following are just a sample - may be not even a representative one - of the sites from which you may wish to learn:

 
 
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