Some past and present members of staff at the Pitt Rivers Museum have bent over backwards to help us create this website. They include:
Elin Bornemann
Jeremy Coote
Mark Dickerson
Eric Edwards
Haas Ezzet
Philip Grover
Dan Hicks
Kate Jackson
Zena McGreevy
Chris Morton
Sian Mundell
Matthew Nicholas
Malcolm Osman
Laura Peers
Suzy Prior
Heather Richardson
Imogen Simpson-Mowday
Kate Webber
Kate White
Cathy Wright
The project team would like to thank Ollie Douglas, Mike Heaney and Peter Rivière for their help while the website was being developed. Mike and Peter have also contributed object biographies to the site, and Peter has contributed several themed articles. Roy Brigden (Museum of English Rural Life), Jeremy Coote (PRM), Elizabeth Edwards (University of the Arts, London), Malcolm Graham (Oxfordshire Studies Centre, Oxfordshire City Council), Phil Pratt (Social History Curator, Oxfordshire Museums Service) and Alison Roberts of the Ashmolean Museum have provided much useful advice and information. Our thanks also to Katy Barrett who volunteered with the Other Within project, and then scanned all the Balfour diaries, we wish her success in her future museum career. Our thanks to Malcolm Osman, Suzy Prior, Kate Jackson and Heather Richardson who provided photographs for the site.
In addition, some friends and colleagues from outside the Museum have also provided us with much help and encouragement:
Chantal Knowles
Frances Larson
Rebe Taylor
Hélène La Rue had planned to contribute many object biographies and thematic presentations before her untimely demise. After this unhappy event, the research team agreed that we would ask other members of Pitt Rivers Museum staff and friends to contribute object biographies to ensure that the website, though constructed by and for the Other Within research team would also reflect a wider museum contribution. These contributors include (in alphabetical order):
Meghan Backhouse
Katy Barrett
Elin Bornemann
Eric Edwards
Daria Carla Evers
Lazarus Halstead
Mike Heaney
Luke Houston
Alice Little
Karen Mak
Nicolette Makovichy
Zena McGreevy
Sandra Modh
Chris Morton
Linda Mowat
Imogen Crawford-Mowday
Philip Platt
Mariana Pote
Heather Richardson
Peter Rivière
Vernon Silver
Joshua Callaghan-Sloane
Andrew White
Finally, our thanks to Isobel Edwards, a third-year undergraduate at the University of Nottingham studying geography in 2009-10, who chose this website as the subject of one of her third-year dissertations. She carried out a series of interviews with people associated with the website. In her discussion with Alison Petch she commented that the images used on the site seemed to her to reinforce the romantic, bucolic and folkloric aspects to the English collections. This came as a surprise to Alison, who believed she had chosen images for the pages on purely practical grounds*. Upon mature reflection though she concurred with Isobel that the logo (created by David Harris, the website's first designer) and the images might combine to give this unintended effect. Whilst many of the English artefacts do come from rural areas, and some are associated with broadly folkloric themes, that is not true for all the collections which are, in fact, dominated by stone tools, but which do reflect a very wide range of 'English' artefacts.
The potentially romanticising aspects of the images on the site, which had also been previously commented on by Chris Wingfield, was therefore (hopefully) mitigated by a consequent diminishment in the number of photographs of rural English scenes, which had previously been used to embellish the more introductory pages. The website orginators hope that the website textual contents continue to reflect the very wide scope of the English collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.
[* The practical grounds for selecting images for the site: the project team were conscious of the need to create the website for the minimum amount of money. To this end they wished to restrict the number of new images that needed to be created for the site, particularly to minimise the impact the project and website would have upon the already-stretched museum photographic services. To this end many of the images of artefacts used photographs already taken of English objects for other purposes, for example for visiting researchers to the museum.]