Heather Johnson & Alison Firth (National Museum of the Royal Navy)

The National Museum of the Royal Navy (NMRN) is the newest National Museum. The museum holds extensive art, photographic and library collections inherited from its founding collections of the Royal Marines Museum, Royal Naval Museum, Royal Navy Submarine Museum, Fleet Air Arm Museum, Explosion! Museum of Naval Firepower, and recent additions from the Ministry of Defence’s art collection. These total over 2.2 million photographs, 6,500 artworks and 35,000 published items.

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Imagery in the collection is found not only in traditional sources, but also in diaries, Midshipmen journals, training documents and other works undertaken for military reconnaissance. Talented amateur artists who served in all branches of the Royal Navy are well represented within the collection.  This category includes Vice Admiral Sir Roderick Macdonald RN, Lieutenant Colonel William Masters RMLI, Captain James Cottell RM and Captain Guy Griffiths RM. The collection holds classically defined artworks by renowned artists such as William Beechey, John Hoppner, Dominic Serres, Nicholas Pocock, James Northcote, William Lionel Wyllie, Norman Wilkinson, Terence Cuneo and Muirhead Bone. A significant proportion of the works of art held across all five museums are attributed to unknown artists.  The collection faces many challenges in documentation: a significant number of our works have minimal detail on the artist, their service or the image’s context. The museum has strong collections that would support further research into the creator and the image.

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The NMRN is embarking on a major project (SeaMore) to create a new Royal Marines Museum as well as a collections centre (Centre for Discovery). This aims to bring the collections closer together and make them more accessible both physically and digitally to our audiences. To achieve this, work is being undertaken to improve the documentation and digitisation of our image collections.  The talk/presentation will look at SeaMore, both as a project to make our image collections more accessible, and to investigate some of the biggest challenges we face in terms of documenting our image collection.

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Heather Johnson is a qualified librarian with a Pg. Dip. in Information Management. Heather has worked in libraries and with bibliographic data since 1993. The last ten years have been spent with the library and archives of the National Museum of the Royal Navy, where she is currently Curator (Archives).

Alison Firth, Curator (Images) at the National Museum of the Royal Navy, where she has worked with naval and military collections since 1995. Alison studied Economic History before completing a Pg. Dip. in Museum & Gallery Studies and an AMA. Recently she has specialised in art and photographic collections, but previously worked more widely in collections management for various museum services.