Day 4: Churchill War Rooms

To start off the second week of classes, we went to the Churchill War Rooms. For the most part, this visit was self-guided. We were given audio tours; however, after my experience the previous week at Westminster Abbey, I was starting to really dislike audio tours. I already tend to be a bit critical of museums because the material is arranged and interpreted for the audience by whoever created the exhibit (as opposed to archives generally simply providing the materials), but audio tours add another layer of control over how the audience absorbs the information. So for that reason, I went without the audio tour and explored the rooms on my own, which was a bit challenging because so much of this museum was set up for the audio tour.

Seeing the rooms as they were during WWII was very cool. I especially enjoyed seeing the maps laid out with marks and pins in them (I have worked a lot with digitizing map and aerial photograph material). However, something that I had noticed was that some of the documents on display were kept together with paper clips, which is, of course, a big no-no for archival preservation. I figure that these documents are likely surrogates for display purposes and the paperclips are simply for aesthetic, but it's the little things we notice, right?

The offending paperclip, and on a photograph no less! Oh the horror!