museumsketchbooks.com is a new digital resource from Oxford University Museums to support art and design students develop their sketchbook based research skills.
The interactive website was built primarily with students aged 14-16 in mind to complement a ‘sketchbook introduction’ museum visit. The aims of the project were to make the museums’ popular and heavily used example sketchbooks accessible to students and teachers as a resource pre- and post-visit, and also, to utilise digital’s ability for ‘layering’ content enabling students to examine more deeply the composition of sketchbooks, and dig into additional resources in the featured collections.
The current pilot site provides four sketchbooks, one inspired by each of the Oxford University Museums, showing the types of information a student might collect whilst on a visit, and examples of how they might bring these together as a coherent sketchbook page. The sketchbooks are high resolution, allowing for deep zoom, and overlaid with ‘hotspots’ that the student can trigger to open in a lightbox. Museum education officers use these hotspots to provide information about the composition of the page, tips to students on creating their own pages, and links to further resources about the collections to support students in developing their critical understanding of artists, techniques and materials.
Oxford University Museums intend to further develop the resource in a way that is as useful as possible to students and teachers. Feedback to help achieve this will be greatly appreciated. Please get in touch with Miranda Millward if you would like to give feedback
24 Apr 2017
