ABSTRACT
The museum, traditionally, brings the general public into contact with objects of historic value. This is particularly the presumption surrounding national museums: that these historic buildings contain historic collections through which our national history can be told. Their fundamental civic duty is to collect and steward such objects, and to provide unimpeded access to them. The evidence for this presupposition of historic value and duty is in structures of governance and regulation: one of the pillars of the government’s sponsorship of national museums is to facilitate ‘free public access to the national collections’ (DCMS 2015). Whatever the details of care and access, the overarching aim remains the same. Object engagement is entirely determined by the museum’s curatorially motivated decisions over what, 205when, how, and why objects are collected or displayed. Such curatorial gatekeeping is the pinnacle of hands-off history: a one-directional knowledge exchange wherein all the museumgoer brings is their eyes. However, as this chapter argues, within current museum discourse there is the will to shift the rules of engagement. The spirit of hands on history is incrementally shifting how museumgoers engage with objects, and that shift is evident in the changing ways in which individual museum objects are utilised.
