Cameron Taylor, of Seabridge Consultants, heritage and interpretation professsional, offers his own personal perspective on the renovations at Inverness Museum.

The heritage of the Highlands is a rich one, extending from the distant geological past through to more recent history. Inverness Museum has an important role to play in conserving and presenting this heritage.

Prior to its recently completed refurbishment, the museum lacked the freshness and inspiration that is needed to engage modern museum visitors. What, then, of the refurbished museum?

The refurbishment

A new green glazed extension housing a passenger lift has been added to the building’s entrance, improving access. Inside, the permanent museum display starts on the ground floor where the re-designed galleries take visitors on a journey through Highland geology, archaeology, history and wildlife. The journey ends on the museum’s first floor where there is a space for temporary exhibitions.

Returning to the ground floor there is a Discovery Room and space for talks and events, as well as a new café, toilets and shop.

The ‘old’ museum closed for refurbishment in July 2006 and the Culture Minister Patricia Ferguson officially opened the refurbished Inverness Museum and Art Gallery on 12 January 2007. A new contemporary branding ‘IMAG’ is being progressively introduced to print and online material.

The visitor experience

Haley Sharpe Design, the design consultant for the museum refurbishment project, has an excellent reputation and I had high expectations for my first visit.

Arriving, the interior of the new museum entrance is clean and bright, if not a little sterile. The reception desk was manned and we were greeted warmly. Opinions differ about museum charging and this is not the place for such a debate, but if museum entry is free then encouraging donations becomes doubly important. There was a beautifully designed ‘animatronic’ collection machine beside the reception desk. In terms of visitor experience, this might have been better placed at the end of the visit rather than the beginning.

The routing of visitors through the exhibits starts with a ‘Where it all Began’ section. The interpretation design is aesthetically pleasing and there is lots of material. The use of questions in interpretation design is, of course, best practice and it was good to see accessible, interesting questions. I was accompanied on my visit by my ten year old daughter and she spent time reading the questions and the ‘headline’ interpretation.

As we progressed in time through the exhibits, it would have been good to see greater use of maps, localising the artefacts and associated interpretation and encouraging visitors to go and experience the environment and history of the Highlands for themselves. This can be a difficult issue for museums which, after all, have as their focus collections of ‘things’, but there is a strong case for museum interpretation to integrate much more closely with other visitor attractions and the landscape more generally.

Returning to the museum exhibition, though, the use of hands-on activities is excellent. For example the Bronze Age pot which visitors can reconstruct was a clear hit with children and adults alike.

There are some attractive interpretative display boards amongst the exhibits and the subtly coloured timeline serves as a useful reminder of the chronological flow. More could have been done with this to tie the whole museum exhibition together. An accompanying leaflet would have made the flow through the exhibits clearer and reinforced the interpretative messages.

As the visitor moves through the exhibits and encounters material from the medieval period the interpretative boards become bilingual Gaelic and English. Done in this way the use of Gaelic feels a little disjointed and artificial – arguably the interpretation throughout the museum should be bilingual.

A further problem with this area of the museum is the interpretation of Medieval Inverness. The use of a window on to the street area outside is intriguing, but unfortunately the street view includes some tired and boarded up buildings and the accompanying interpretative material is not strong enough to overcome this rather negative view of the city centre. It might have been preferable to use the window itself more creatively by, for example, etching a view of the medieval town on it.

Continuing upstairs to the rest of the galleries the visitor encounters the stories of Culloden, the Clearances and the development of the Highlands into modern times.

There is a great deal of exhibition material here and the modern artefacts in particular are almost overwhelming in volume, but Culloden and the Clearances are not interpreted as well as they should be. There is a difficulty here, of course, in that the National Trust for Scotland will shortly open its new visitor centre and reinterpreted battlefield at Culloden, providing the focus for the story of Culloden. And the Fonn’s Duthchas touring exhibition contains some compelling material about both Culloden and the social and economic history of the Highlands, including the Clearances. The problem is that the permanent museum exhibition at IMAG feels ‘light’ on both Culloden and the Clearances. Given that these are the top two iconic stories that holidaymakers – particularly North Americans – want to understand, this is perhaps unfortunate.

The PC in the upper exhibition area, with access to the Am Baile site, would have gone some way to provide the depth of information visitors might want but the PC was out of order during my visit.

Café and shop

Returning downstairs to the museum’s ground floor, the new café attempts a contemporary feel with modern furniture and a specialist coffee–making machine. The café feels very cramped, particularly when larger groups of visitors come in, and the décor is not to everyone’s taste.

The café is next to natural history displays including stuffed animals. While these are obviously popular with young visitors they have an old-fashioned feel to them, especially set alongside the excellent contemporary interpretative boards earlier in the exhibition.

A shop with a rather uninspiring selection of items for sale is situated next to the café. A significant missed opportunity was a souvenir guide book to accompany the permanent museum exhibition. I do hope one is planned for the near future. Not only would such a book reinforce the interpretive messages included in the exhibition, it would also help generate revenue for the museum.

A confused identity?

The story told in the museum is that of the Highlands but the museum’s brand identity – IMAG – associates it firmly with Inverness. Of course, the city has played an important role in the development of the Highlands but I wonder whether there is not a danger of confusion here.

For Inverness residents wanting to understand the development of the city, IMAG’s displays may not offer enough. On the other hand, people who live in the Highlands out-with Inverness may feel disinclined to visit a museum they perceive as ‘about Inverness’.

And from a holidaymakers’ perspective, there are lots of visitor attractions clamouring for attention during a relatively short visit to the region. To compete, visitor attractions must offer a strong, unambiguous, clearly articulated proposition. IMAG doesn’t yet do so.

The lack of cohesion between the re-designed museum, the design of the IMAG ‘What’s On’ leaflet and the Inverness Museum web site www.invernessmuseum.com does not help.

A ten year old’s perspective

Here is what my daughter thought about the museum:

I think it was made for mixed age groups and anyone would enjoy it. I liked the different activities because it gives you something to do as well as just looking at things. I didn’t like the fact that there aren’t many activities upstairs. I learnt that history can be fun to learn about if you set it out the right way.

Conclusion

There is some wonderful material in the Inverness Museum, and some of the new interpretation design is excellent, but the overall experience did not come up to expectations. It feels rather as if there was no shortage of ideas behind the refurbishment but there was insufficient time, money, and perhaps will, available to create the iconic, compelling, inspiring museum that our rich heritage merits and the region deserves.