Placement Report
Seaton Delaval Hall
2nd Aug to 4th Nov
Hannah James Louwerse
The aims of the placement at Seaton Delaval Hall were to help set up a Research Room, continue conducting oral history interviews, and generally experience day-to-day life on a National Trust site in order to see how the systems and process of the National Trust will impact my designs.
The first aim, help set up a Research Room, resulted in a collection of outputs, which make up a foundation for the staff at the hall to build on in the future. It included: drafts of different forms, an indexing system, and a guide to the Research Room and its processes. The development of the Research Room and my outputs started with me looking into the possible storage options. However due to current developments within the National Trust’s IT systems I was slightly restricted and settled on creating a temporary solution that fits easily within the current IT system but can easily be adapted should the IT situation develop. Moving on from storage systems, I created a spreadsheet which functioned as a basic index for all the material the Trust holds outside of the collection. However, it quickly became apparent that filling in the index and moving material the Research Room was not possible without the correct paperwork. As the name suggests the Research Room is meant to hold, among other things, research. Research is a creative product, meaning whoever made it holds its copyright. For this reason, I created a series of forms that will assist in making the material accessible under copyright law, protecting both the original creator and the National Trust. In addition to copyright law, I also became familiar with the National Trust’s data protection policies as the forms I was making included the collecting of personal data. By the end of my placement, I gained a good base knowledge of data protection and copyright law, which I believe will be useful to have in situations beyond my PhD.
As for the second aim of continuing to collect oral history, because I was at the hall four days a week the staff got to know me and my work better, I believe this led to them actively helping me in finding more participants. I was therefore able to do four more interviews. I also created a prototype sound walk out of the oral history interviews, which takes you all around the property.
The third aim of simply experiencing the day-to-day life of a National Trust property was enlightening and led to some radical changes to my PhD. Most significantly I realised how different the collection of oral history on heritage sites is in comparison to academic oral history and community oral history. While academic and community oral history focus on the recording and analysing of people’s life stories, oral history on heritage sites is simply another thing they need to collect and maintain alongside everything else. This realisation impacted the framing of my PhD and has given me the opportunity to develop design solutions better tailored to fit the wider National Trust eco system.