 Thank you for having me. This presentation... I represent the Shipwreck Centre and Maritime Museum on the White Island in the UK. This presentation is going to start with a question. Is this museum... I'm talking about the Shipwreck Centre and Maritime Museum for us as academics or the public. This is 15 minutes. I really tried to talk. It can focus only on the history of the items themselves, but forget what's wider in there and who collected them. We've heard some really nice presentations this afternoon and morning of collections that have been put together by individuals. But what I think, and I haven't had all of the presentations in this session, is that most of them focus on the individuals that collected these in the 18th century, like the British Museum, the Federalist Museum, 1884 and other museums, maybe towards the early 20th century. But this presentation will actually focus on history just happening at the moment. So, just bring us to where we are in the world. The south coast of the UK, on this island, are your whites. And the Shipwreck Centre and Maritime Museum was initially started in Bembridge in 1978. So 40 years ago this year. And in 2006 it moved to Ericsson, which was just in the middle of the island. It moved from a coastal position. You can hear on that on the name of the museum. It is a Maritime Museum. But it moved into this art village as such. There's an old village with a church, a duck pond, which is just here, and other arts and crafts, attractions, pub as well, a sweet shop. And we're hosting this old barn that's been converted to be a museum, perfectly converted for the Museum when it moved in 2006. So that's where we are at the moment. The museum was started 40 years ago by Martin Woodhead. He's still alive. He just turned 40, 70, about two days ago. He just got married. He's very much of a character. And he grew up on the island. He wasn't born there. He grew up there, which apparently I've understood is quite a big difference for him. He always looked up to the sea and thought, what is there? Where can I find adventure? Back then, he didn't need his island qualification. He just bought some equipment and started diving. In the south coast of England, and the art port is around Isle of Wight, the island is filled with shipwrecks. Shipwrecks from almost any time period up to modern shipwrecks, but a well or one or one or two are highly censored there as well. So he started diving and looking and bringing up as much as he could possibly do. And the thing is, is this an archaeological collection? No, it's not. I am an archaeologist, but this is not an archaeological collection such, because we have no record of where the objects and artefacts had really been recovered more than we know them. And as I would mention later as well, in the database, would you try to record the data? But he spent most of his time. Later, he trained as a commercial diver. He worked in the North Sea, among other places, and made it really his career. He's still out there collecting items, but by the time he was 29, he decided that his living room was a little bit too small to fit this private collection that was growing quite fast. And he decided to buy a cottage and turn it into a museum, as you do. As a part of this, I also need to mention that what Martin does and has done for the last 50 years, is legal in the UK. It's not encouraged by the archaeological community, but it is legal. And as long as you report everything to the receiver of Wreck, you are actually not breaking the law. So, if you don't report your fines to the receiver, you can be in trouble. And this is an article from 2014 in the newspaper The Guardian, where divers have been prosecuted and had to pay hefty fines for not reporting these fines. Because there are protected wrecks, and there are wrecks that aren't protected where you can't interact with them. So Martin is not diving on any protected wrecks. He's diving on other, but reporting everything and doing it according to UK law. So, 40 years ago, he bought this modest cottage in Bambridge, and he spent the next couple of years, the first 10 years, really, to convert it into a museum. So this is what it looked like when he first bought it. And this is 84, I believe, to 284, when he's put in a more of an open window here. So that's the window there to show what it looks like. This is also him wearing a ship's bell as a hat. But, I mean, he's done an amazing job with not only collecting all of his artefacts, he's also looked after them. He's made sure they're all very stable. He used very simple but very effective ways of stabilising and conserving these fines. And we had a curator and conservator around to the museum. And when he left, he was almost in tears, because he felt like his whole life had gone to learn about conservation and do conservation and treat and tell other people about conservation. And then you have this Martin guy, who just used a bit of oil, a bit of brass polish, and he's got a full museum full of things that have never actually been conserved according to archaeological conservation techniques. So he was a little bit upset at the end of that. But Martin felt that he had put as much as he possibly could into the museum. And it moved to Eiraten because Bembridge was getting a bit small, there wasn't any parking. And he felt that the people coming there couldn't really enjoy the collection as he was intended. So last year, 2017, he approached the Maritime Archaeology Trust, which is a local archaeological organisation in Southampton and asked if we could, in a way, take over the management and turn this museum into something new and say it towards a bright future. So since last spring, so 2017 spring, the Maritime Archaeology Trust has been managing the museum. And I do keep on using the World Museum. Martin was always quite careful with the World Museum. He always said it's called the Shipwreck Centre, and this is the logo that he's made to develop. So you see that the Shipwreck Centre, at Maritime Museum. And that's really, I think, his attitude, and he's done an amazing job with it, but he never really wanted to be a museum as such. But here I come with all my new family ideas and changes. He's not, I think, that keen on changes. But now we have this collection, and I will show examples from the collection in the later slides. But we also have, we've got trustees, because we are a Maritime Archaeology Trust, we've got the curator in this case, we've got formal procedures, we've got displays and databases. We're working towards museum accreditation if you're familiar with it, with the UK system. This is a two-stage system where you first apply to be working towards accreditation, and that was approved earlier this year. So now we have a year to put in a full application. And then, among Solida, we have a visit to staff and volunteers. So suddenly from being almost like a collector's paradise where you put everything that you like, you're actually a part of a larger system. And the museum itself is almost like a flayer in this field. It's a new character that we need to look after and sometimes make a very harsh decision on the collections. So if a museum is only as good as its collection, we have an amazing museum. These are only a few examples of how things are displayed. And it's not a very modern way of doing it, I would say. But people love it. Ideally I would like to go in and I would move a lot of it out into storage and magazines. We don't have any storage for magazines. We also have a very small budget. The museum just about makes even. I did my own master's dissertation on navigation divided. And here they are with hardly any labels. Next to some gold coin replicas. We have some pocket watches. These are also coins that haven't been extracted from. The completion is a couple of shipwrecks in the same display case. And this area, which is under one of the stairs, illustrates how a shipwreck site looks to the dive and finds it. Which being a dive, I can't really identify with. But it's a lot of finds in a small area. And people do like it, Martin likes it. And I can see the traction of walking around and really having time to look at all of these items. But in terms of modernising it, it needs something, I think, without taking away what Martin did. So a sample of where my decisions were not the right one and hopefully I didn't go ahead with it, is that we have a video room. So the museum is made up of the main gallery here. And then we have another gallery that shows space for the museum. And we have a DVD gallery, you might call it. And I first heard of it, I thought it was DVD. Who watches DVDs anyway? But it takes up quite a lot of space in terms of what space we do have. And ideally I thought, initially I thought, let's take this out, let's take the DVD out and use this space to make a nice gallery where you can walk to. We'll have a nice display case as well and we'll have a nice item where the proper way of describing it. But this DVD, and this is, I can see, I'll spend Martin up a little bit. It's 45 minutes long when it's in the museum. This is a one minute summary of it. And it was also key for me to stop talking when the video finished. But I'll turn it on again. This is a one minute summary. It shows the museum, Martin tells stories about how he found artefacts. And people just love it. They sit there for 45 minutes and then they spend another hour or so in the museum. And people buy the DVD. It's one of our best sellers. It just goes, and that shows where maybe my decisions always are into best. So here, another example is what do we do with? How do we modernise it? Without losing all the work for Martin's son but also without losing Martin in this collection because I think it's a strong selling point. I think that people would want to come and see the story of him. I was standing next to his wife one day and one of the people visiting went past and said, oh, I wouldn't want to be married to him. Here's a bridge telegraph recovered from the wreck of SS Mandy last 1917. It was recovered and stored by Martin Woodwood in 1987. Let's say that's a typical museum sign of this very, very important shipwreck which you might have heard of because it was in the news recently where the burn from the shipwreck was actually presented by Theresa May to the South African government and president. But Martin was the first one to find the wreck. He often describes the wreck as his favourite wreck amongst shipwrecks that he's died. No one knew where he was. And his amazing history, especially for South Africa because more than 600 people were lost on the wreck. So it has an important history from the historical point of view. It's important for Martin because he did find it. He spent years going out there on the Remembrance Day and on the day of sinking and putting up the reefs. And he's been involved. It's important for him to how do we then capture that story together with the telegraph as an example. And of course we can use 3D techniques. We can use screens. We can put up posters. And it would be really easy if we only had the telegraph. But then we have the next display case with the same amount of material. And even more. So I'm just finishing off again by asking what will get lost if we focus only on the history of the items. So only the objects. Only the telegraph itself. But we forget why they're in there. We forget the important work that Martin has done for the last 40 years and 50 years. And then another 50 years will end up not knowing very much about it all. And all of it will get lost. We have started data basing in. And we have more than 700 records where Martin goes in and fills in the details that aren't obvious in the museum. So we're trying to capture this information and hopefully move towards a creditor museum where both the visitor students can come in and do research on this unique artefact and objects. And we have parts of the museum worth. So I think I'll finish that.