The National Printing Heritage Committee (UK) is delighted to announce that the Virtual Museum of Printing has now launched and can be accessed at https://www.vmop.org.uk/. The Virtual Museum is an online museum collective with the aim of bringing together the printing historical resources of the British Isles in one site. It currently features a directory of printing historical collections, and a case study of The Winterbourne Press. Plans are afoot for further case studies, development of the online resources, and events.
Inspired by the long-held ambition of the National Printing Heritage Committee to found a national collection of printing heritage, the Virtual Museum offers an accessible, free overview of where members of the public, researchers and other specialists can find archives and materials.
To help visitors of VMoP understand the human stories around printing history and print culture, and to help VMoP engage a broad and diverse audience, we invite blog contributions.
Submissions should be between 500 and 2,000 words, and they can be about any aspect of the printing history of any culture, as long as it is relevant to ‘collections’ (broadly understood) held in the British Isles. A successful submission should inspire readers’ interest and direct them towards archival resources or museum collections (physical or online) where they can further their engagement.
Contributions are invited from individual researchers and practitioners who wish to share their ideas and findings; from archivists and collection holders who would like to share details about an aspect of their collections; and from heritage organisations keen to publicise ideas and initiatives that advance knowledge and understanding of printing history and heritage. If you or your organisation has an idea you would like to discuss and develop, please contact VMoP’s blog editor Dr Shijia Yu at yu.shijia@outlook.com. Potential topics can include, but are not limited to:
- Figures in printing history.
- Global printing and print culture.
- Technological development in printing history.
- Historical printing artefacts (and their products).
- Printing designs.
- Representations of printing.
- Places of significance in printing history.
- Contemporary responses to historical printing artefacts or designs.
- Initiatives and projects in the printing history and heritage community.
When writing your post, please bear in mind the guidance below:
- A wide range of readers will access the VMoP blogs, and many of them are not print specialists. You should not assume prior knowledge of specialist terms or facts, and you should ensure that you sufficiently explain any such references in the blog. Combining elementary information with more detailed information is also an effective way to make your post interesting to readers with varying degrees of knowledge about printing history.
- Although printing history is exciting, this might not be immediately obvious to everyone! Engage your readers by highlighting the relevance of your story to them and building a connection between them and the piece of printing history you tell.
- Images help! Please include up to three images with captions, ensuring that you have the permission to publish the image in this way (if the image is not open access, written permissions will be required).
- No-one can know everything about printing history, so it is absolutely fine to admit uncertainties and be open about what is still unknown. In fact, you can get your readers more involved and prompt thinking by pointing out questions that the current research still has not answered.
- Keep your paragraphs short and snappy, and consider using subheadings effectively to organise your information in easily accessible layers.
- To make your blogpost more accessible, it is good practice to ensure that if you have idioms or culturally specific references, they can be understood by readers from diverse cultural backgrounds.
- We aim to make the blog an educational resource as well as a means of engaging the public. Alongside links to collections or archives, you are welcome to include up to three suggestions for further reading at the bottom, though please ensure that these are open access.
(Article courtesy of Printing History News)