History of Art and the LEMUR Project

The LEMUR (Learning with Museum Resources) project will draw on one of the country's most significant museum resources, the collections of the University of Aberdeen's Marischal Museum and Natural Philosophy Collection, LEMUR will create a resource base of 3500 items designed to provide robust access for a range of teaching purposes in Higher Education. Within LEMUR, the six targeted teaching packages developed by teaching partners in Cultural History, the History and Philosophy of Science, History of Art and Physics demonstrate the value of the resource to Arts, Sciences and Social Science, provide teaching resources for the HE community.

The Honours option being developed by Dr John Morrison, 'Painting in a Stateless Nation. Scottish Painting 1707-1843' will use the database of resources to facilitate student designed online case studies. The case studies will be constructed by uploading a selection of artefacts from the LEMUR database, and presenting this as well as other pertinent information as a Web page. Peer assessment and reflection upon the case studies will be enabled by: a case study presentation area, an online interview room where students interview the presenter of a case study, peer assessment questionnaires where views are summarised, a self-assessment questionnaire on the learning outcomes which will be delivered at the beginning and end of the project, forming a learning log. A Tutor Assessment Interface will allow the tutor to view each case study in conjunction with summarises of Peer Assessment, the Self-Assessment/Learning Log, , and logs of students usage.

The construction of the case study and the peer assessment and reflection on it will utilise and further develop information gathering, critical evaluation and analytic skills, whilst extending presentation and communication experience into an online environment. In the process of completing the project, the student will track and interpret a series of connections between the core project material, the wider Database and external sources: this will extend the student's awareness of the collections in a historical, geographical and cultural context. This contextual awareness will be further supported and advanced in the peer and self-assessment process.

For further information, see the library web page at:

http://www.abdn.ac.uk/diss/historic/lemur