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City's heritage on world stage
Hull is a city with a proud history – and more than 100,000 artefacts from its museums and galleries are now on the Internet for the whole world to see
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This month's front cover stars are the Roos Carr figures, which can be seen at the Hull and East Riding Museum. Made from palm wood, they are believed to date from the late Bronze Age or early Iron Age. They were found in 1836 during drainage work at Roos Carr, East Yorkshire. |
Almost half-a-million people visited Hull's 9 museums and galleries last year.
They hold a wealth of artefacts from Victorian slides, a woolly mammoth model, to vintage transport and classic artworks – and they're free to get in!
But now the treasures have been opened up to an even greater audience on the Internet.
A new website (www.hullcc.gov.uk/ museumcollection) holds details and images of more than 100,000 artefacts.
Details of a further 300,000 artefacts will be uploaded over the next 12 months.
"The items on display in the museum buildings represent less than 10 per cent of the total holding," says collections project manager Simon Wilson.
"So the website is an excellent way for people to access some of the other exhibits."
What's on the website?
You can find out about the discovery of Britain's oldest ball, which was excavated in the early 1970s in High Street, and dates back to the 13th century, or learn about the woolly mammoths which weighed as much as eight double-decker buses, and bounded around the region more than 75,000 years ago.
See the ancient Bronze Age figures which have detachable male genitalia - and read about their discovery in the East Riding.
Then move into the modern era and see one of the earliest anti-slave trade posters, or marvel at one of the world's earliest bicycles, or discover why an entire chemist shop was transported from Leeds and recreated in Hull.
Artefacts on the website are split into five main sections: 'Wilberforce and slavery,' 'On the move,' 'Weird and wonderful,' 'How we used to live,' and 'Hull and the sea.'
There are also thousands of images, including hundreds of sketches, paintings and sculptures, and a wide range of coins, glass, pottery, mosaics and silver and decorative items.
"The idea is that somebody visiting the site can read a story about a person or object and come away saying 'I didn't know that,'" says Mr Wilson.
History of Hull museums
The museum collections can trace their origins back to 1822 with the foundation of the Hull Literary and Philosophical Society, which set them up.
Responsibility for the collections was handed over to Hull City Council (then known as Hull Corporation) in 1900, and since then they have grown enormously, especially under the first curator Thomas Sheppard.
During the Second World War, the entire documentation about the collections was lost, and thousands of irreplaceable artefacts were destroyed too, when an incendiary bomb struck the Municipal Museum, in Albion Street.
In 2005, funding was made available to undertake a three-year project to make the collections more accessible.
And a dedicated team of museum professionals began listing items on a database, with a view to building the website.
And there's more...
Apart from the stories, the images and the image galleries, the site also contains screensavers to download onto your computer, e-cards for you to send to friends and family and quizzes to test your knowledge.
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