Journeys in the Roman Empire (hereafter called Journeys) was conceived as a joint project between The British Museum, Verulamium Museum and Channel 4 Education; the production of the disk was sub-contracted to a television and multimedia production company 'Braunarts'. The intended audience is mainly 8 to 11 year old children studying Roman Britain at school (at Key Stage 2 of the United Kingdom's National Curriculum). However, as the project coordinator, I had always intended the CD-Rom to have an appeal and educational value to older children and adults. Indeed, 11-14 year olds studying Key Stage 3 History have been an important audience already. This encourages family use away from the classroom and further strengthens The British Museum's outreach programmes. The CD was published in January 2001.
Journeys has drawn upon the wealth of The British Museum's collections. Eight curatorial departments had provided their expertise and images of their collections for this venture: Greek and Roman, Prehistory and Early Europe, Mediaeval and Modern Europe, The Ancient Near East, Ancient Egypt and Sudan, Oriental, Coins and Medals, and Ethnography. We had also used a good number of images from Verulamium Museum which complemented our collection. Because the British Museum does not have a specific site under its care, the CD-Rom also has an international flavour, reflecting the diversity of the collections, so the journeys also use images from sites across three continents. This underlines how multimedia projects enable one to bring together material from across a broad range of museum and archaeological sources - a new synthesis of sites, artefacts and concepts is therefore possible.
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URL: http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue12/4/intro.html
Last updated: Thu Aug 1 2002