Interpretive planning

When people visit your community archive, you are helping them discover the history of people and places from your area - this is often their own history. Creating an exhibition of highlights from your collection is a great way to bring this history to life.

Whether it's online or in a physical space, your exhibition needs to be organised to give clear messages and stories to your visitors.

Setting out what these will be, and how you will present them through your collection, is called interpretive planning.

Creating an interpretive plan has many benefits. It will:

• Ensure the team understands the aims of the exhibition so you can produce a display that makes sense as a whole
• State what you hope to achieve with the exhibition - this is helpful if you are applying for funding
• Make sure your visitors have an enjoyable experience, learn from your collections and make meaningful connections with its messages and stories
• Give each exhibition you stage its own character, so you can attract new and repeat visitors to your community archive

When planning an exhibition, the first step is to create an interpretive plan. This includes:

• A simple statement of the goals and objectives you want to achieve
• The themes you will use to explore these goals and objectives
• A list of documents and items you wish to display

You can then use the interpretive plan to decide a layout for your exhibition and act as a guide to writing text for any explanatory panels and captions.

Remember, interpretive planning is a creative process and good ideas can pop up at any time. As you develop your exhibition and discover new items and stories, you may need to go back to the plan and adjust it as you go along.

Setting goals and objectives

Start by thinking about the big picture. Try answering the following three questions:

Why are we preparing this exhibition?

You might stage an exhibition to:

• Publicise your archive
• Mark the completion of a project
• Commemorate a significant anniversary
• Engage with a particular audience or group (eg a school)
• Recruit new volunteers
• Gather new items or information

What do we want visitors to learn from our collection?

When people leave your exhibition, what key message do you want them to come away with? Write these down using bullet points and short statements. These will form your exhibition goals. Sometimes it may feel like you are stating the obvious, but identifying these goals will help you prioritise and focus. For example:

• Goal 1 - For visitors to understand when and why our village was built
• Goal 2 - For visitors to learn that many of the buildings in our village are from medieval times
• Goal 3 - To highlight some of the prominent/famous residents who have lived in our village

Is there anything we would like to learn or get from our visitors?

For example:

• Goal 1 - To attract new donations to the archive
• Goal 2 - To collect stories of local families
• Goal 3 - To collect memories of people who went to the local primary school

You may want to then create objectives for your goals. These are the specific, measurable ways you will achieve them. For example, if your goal is for visitors to learn that there are lots of medieval houses in your village, an objective could be that visitors leave your exhibition being able to identify the village's oldest house.

Setting out objectives will help give you more focus and will be particularly useful if you are developing a funding application.

In practice, your goals and objectives might look quite similar. It is much more important to understand what you are trying to achieve than to get too bogged down in deciding what is a goal or what is an objective.

Developing themes

Your goals should help you identify the main topics that show what your exhibition is about.

The next step is to use these goals to create themes that you can illustrate with documents from your collections. For example:

• Theme 1 -  Old houses
• Theme 2 - Old farm buildings
• Theme 3 - Prominent/famous residents of the past
• Theme 4 - Adding to our collections

Drawing up an exhibition inventory

Your group is now agreed on what your exhibition is trying to achieve and what it is going to be about. Draw up a list of the items you want to use for each theme in the exhibition. It is useful to do this in a table.

Exhibition titles

The title you give your exhibition is important. Not only does it tell your visitors what the exhibition will be about, it is also the hook that sparks their curiosity. This will make them want to explore your exhibition to find out more.

Often you'll come up with a title while you discuss your themes and goals. So a useful tip is to choose your exhibition title as late on as possible.

Find out what space you have:

• What size are your exhibition cases, display boards or tables?
• How many of them do you have?
• How might you arrange them in the space?

Then divide the exhibition into sections. The sections might simply be based on your themes. Or your themes could run through each section (eg if each section is a date range or geographical area). Or it could be a mixture of the two.

Remember to include a section which welcomes visitors to the exhibition and briefly introducing its themes.

For example

• Section 1 - Introduction
• Section 2 - North End
• Section 3 - Church Street etc

Now work through your list of items and decide which ones to include in each section. Your goals and objectives will help you decide what to include and what to leave out.

Planning the arrangement of items

A useful way to plan your arrangement is to mark out spaces which are the same size as your panels or cases, and then physically place the items into each space. You may need to make some final changes to the items which can be included at this stage.

When you are happy with the arrangement, take photographs to refer to when you finally install the exhibition.

Produce a final Interpretive planning inventory. This is a record that includes details of each item and its place in the exhibition. Download an example interpretive planning inventory template (Word doc) [13KB].

The text in your exhibition will help to guide visitors and will also bring your exhibition to life for them.

You will need to create interpretive text for the introductory panel, each of the sections and the item labels. This will help visitors understand why you have chosen to display these items, what links them together and, most importantly, what your key messages are.

Make sure you have planned your exhibition layout before you begin writing. If you know how items relate to each other in the display, this will help you make decisions about what to include in your text. See planning the exhibition layout.

Some general rules

• Assume people do not know what they are looking at and need to be drawn in to the item. Point out what is interesting about it.
• Keep text brief. People come to an exhibition to look at objects, not to read. We recommend the following word limits:
  • Introduction panel - up to 160 words
  • Section description - up to 100 words
  • Section label - up to 50 words
• Use short sentences
• Briefly explain any terms visitors might not understand
• Adopt a single text style for the exhibition. Use the same fonts throughout. Bold and large text can emphasise headings and key information.
• Choose simple fonts, such as Arial
• Choose font sizes that are large enough to be read easily - at least size 12 for the body of the text.
• Think about making the text interactive - for example, are there questions you would like your audience to think about and try to answer?

Example of how to format item labels

• Title
• Description
• Reference

For example:

Old Rectory Sale Catalogue, 1922

This was produced when the Old Rectory was auctioned in 1922. It gives a detailed description of the house and gardens. It also shows the interior. During World War II, the original railings from the garden wall were removed and melted down for the war effort.

Ref: PRQ1/34/2

Online engagement can be very useful to community archives groups, who often collect only digital items. Online engagement:

• Attracts a larger and more diverse audience - reaching different groups and locations across the country and the wider world.
• Provides motivation to begin a digitisation programme.
• Can tell a good story, or focus on a subject that is relevant to your community archive and your collections.
• Means all your group members can be involved at different stages- acquiring, sorting, cataloguing and digitising archives, curating exhibitions and writing interpretation.
• Can attract new volunteers and contributors.
• Allows you to publicise your archive - you can get your collections known about and used, and have a basis for funding applications.

There are a number of statistics you can record to gauge the success of your exhibition. Set down the targets you want to achieve:

• Number of visitors to your exhibition website/interactions on social media.
• Number of new volunteers recruited.
• Number of new donations received.
• Funding opportunities received.
• New collections acquired.

Online Interpretation Plan

If you plan to run an online exhibition, consider how you can customise your interpretation plan to focus digital exhibitions.

• Goals and objectives
  • What platform will you use?
  • What audience do you want to attract?
  • How many page views are you targeting?
  • What kind of engagement? Comments? Potential donations? New volunteers?
  • What narrative do you want to tell?
  • What subjects/topics will you cover?
  • Ensure your team has a sense of the whole exhibition and can make suggestions and contributions to it.
  • Set out the message you want to give visitors - what you want them to learn, connect with and think about, how they could learn more and how they could use your archive.
  • Set down the 'character' of the exhibition - is it serious or lighthearted? Is the theme big or small? Can you make it different from other exhibitions you put on?
  • Think of the exhibition's legacy - will you keep the exhibition online? If not, how will you save it for future use?
  • Will you try to get your audience to participate? For example, getting audiences to add comments, or to identify names, places, buildings and so on?
     
• Practical considerations
  • What have you already got digitised? Can you come up with a narrative or theme using these? Or will you need to digitise more?
  • Do you have permission to digitise or use existing digital images? Be aware of any copyright issues, and seek permission if you need to.
  • How many images do you want to use? It's a good idea to have a limited number to maximise their impact.
  • Social media - could you do a Twitter thread interpreting selected images, put a series of images/stories on Instagram, or post images on Facebook? Could these be an introduction or teaser to the main exhibition? Can you join in social media campaigns such as Explore Your Archive?
  • Could you do a regular series of blogs that highlight aspects of the collection? For example, having a regular 'item of the week' column, or a focus on one collection or aspect of the community's history.
  • Can you use your digitised collections as a basis for creating Wikipedia entries?

• Can visitors view any page whenever they like, or does it tell a story and therefore has to be viewed in a given order?
• Is it thematic - does each section focus on a particular topic?
• Could the exhibition be a 'photo essay' - that is, a long-form piece of text with accompanying images?

What to use

• Images of documents
• Photographs
• Digital video excerpts
• Oral history recording excerpts

Inventory

• Make a list of digital items that would fit in with your exhibition criteria.
• Discuss your options within the group so that setting up an online exhibition becomes a collaborative process.

In 1957 Freeman Tilden published 'Interpreting Our Heritage'. In this book, he defined some key principles of interpretation:

• Any interpretation that does not make displays relatable to the personality or experience of the visitor will not be interesting
• Information is not the same as interpretation, although all interpretation includes information. Interpretation is a way of bringing information to life
• The chief aim of interpretation is not to instruct, but to provoke
• Interpretation addressed at children should not be a diluted version of adult interpretation but should follow a different approach. To be at its best it will require a separate programme.

• Draw up an interpretive plan for your exhibition that includes your goals and objectives, the themes you will explore, and a list of items you wish to include
• Set out why you are preparing an exhibition and what you want your visitors to learn. This will help ensure your exhibition is coherent and interesting, and will provide useful information for funding applications.
• Create an inventory of the items you will display, based on things like the size of your display area, your exhibition layout and themes
• Plan the arrangement of your items and take photographs of the layouts to refer to when installing your exhibition
• See 'Making use of the collections' for preservation tips on displaying documents
• Write interpretive text to bring your exhibition to life. Help visitors connect with the items on display and understand your key messages.