The New Curators Project

Delivered by UCL Special Collections

The New Curators Project is a collaboration between UCL Special Collections and Newham Heritage Month to create and support a cohort of 10 young cultural heritage practitioners in 2021.

The project is supported by our Foundations Programme, which is co-funded via a four-year partnership with City of London.

The Foundation Programme’s aim is to develop longer term shared learnings between the two new cultural districts of East Bank and Culture Mile and supports our local collaborative cultural programming around creative education, lifelong learning and employment opportunities.

A volunteer conservator at UCL looks up from the manuscript she is working on. Conservation is sometimes an overlooked element of the cultural heritage sector, but it is a fascinating combination of history, science and art. Photo credit: David Tett.

A group of poets in Stratford Library meet as part of Newham Heritage Month. Running community heritage projects can be a hugely rewarding aspect of working in the cultural heritage sector.

Bringing historic collections to new audiences, such as school groups, is an important part of working in the cultural heritage sector.

Although this project is being run online, it will focus on accessing much of the resources at Newham’s libraries and archive and UCL’s collection of rare books, archives and manuscripts.

A visitor enjoys looking at some of UCL’s rare books with a Rare Books Librarian. Many who work in the sector are specialists who must find ways of presenting and interpreting historical resources for non-specialists.

About the project

The New Curators Project is a collaboration between UCL Special Collections and Newham Heritage Month that seeks to contribute towards making routes into the cultural heritage sector more transparent and accessible to non-graduates in East London.

The project will create and support a cohort of 10 young cultural heritage practitioners in 2021. They will receive training and guidance from a range of professionals, from using digital tools to reach new audiences, to public speaking and professional networking, to carrying out historical research and curatorship. The cohort will produce an exhibition and online programme for Newham Heritage month in May 2021.

While participants will leave with the new skills and confidence needed to enter the sector, they will also have gained real life curation experience for a public heritage audience. Following 2021, participants will form the basis of an alumni group that will be invited to inform future annual iterations of The New Curators Project.

Applicants must:

Be aged 18 to 24
Live, work or study in Newham, Hackney, Tower Hamlets or Waltham Forest
Not have a university degree
Not have more than six months paid experience in the cultural heritage sector.

Each of the 10 places are supported by a £200 bursary.

Applications are open and close on 12 February 2021.

Take part

To take part, email library.spec.coll.ed@ucl.ac.uk, phone 07741671329 or check out the project website, The New Curators Project.

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