Component 1.5 Blog Post 1 – Ideas workshop, deciding on a theme and finding potential collections to exhibit

The brief given to our group from National Library Scotland asks us to work with their collections to design a project which tests creative responses and informs the Library’s future strategy regarding exhibitions of born digital materials. We can work with both digital and physical materials and have been asked to focus our programme around themes that align with Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day (8th March). We have already had and will continue to have meetings and inductions with various staff members within NLS, giving knowledge and insight into their relevant departments and skills. In our introductory meeting to NLS as an institution, Graeme (Head of General Collections), nicely outlined the aim of their public programming as, “We are telling a story”.

Entrance to National Library of Scotland c. The Author (2019)

For our ideas workshop on 1st October, we each were asked to bring along inspirational materials that connect with our brief to share with the group in order to generate ideas. This proved very beneficial as the diversity of our individual contributions provided a good range of topics to discuss together. My contributions included examples of global immersive and interactive exhibitions, but it was the examples that I found from the Library’s Moving Image Archives, particularly of various exercise videos for women in the 1950s, that I found provided the best input from myself to our talk. Our discussion took two strands, theme (deciding on which to go down) and digital display and access. In terms of theme, from our discussion on topics such as hidden female voices, ‘Tips for Girls’ and also unsolicited advice women receive, we managed to narrow down our exhibition to a specific topic: Advice to women, the bad and the good, with an ideal outcome: creating a participatory space for discussion.

c. Glasgow Women’s Library (2016)

The MIA exercise videos from 1953, ‘Fitness for Girls’ and ‘Fitness for Women’, are silent, black and white, short films, and would be a strong potential collection to include into our exhibition in some way as they have many layers of interpretation for this theme. They are both commissioned by National Fitness Council for Scotland, with well meaning advice put forth in a relatively condescending manner via on screen text. Yet, despite the rather insensitive nature of the text based advice, the videos display evidence of activities by movements of women that are still used today, including the Girl Guides and Margaret Morris Movement. The MMM, in particular, was influential in recognising the connection between dance and exercise to promote mental health.

Screenshot of ‘Fitness for Women’ c. National Library of Scotland (2019)

Thinking of the potential range of generations that might come to the exhibition, this would be a good point of discussion in terms of how the videos fit within our cultural heritage. Also, the medium of the films themselves, digitised from their original 16mm format, offer the chance to gather audience’s responses to changing mediums of advice and invite conversations on the authenticity of digital content. In this way, we would be using the library’s collections to tell a specific story to the audience and also to invite one back through a multigenerational and self-reflective response to methods and modes of advice.