Access to our collection
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Whether your research is academic, professional or personal, everyone is welcome to make an appointment to visit Insight, our research centre.
Click to read moreResearchers
Find out everything you need to know about visiting the collection and conducting research at the National Science and Media Museum.
Everyone is welcome to make an appointment to visit Insight: Collections and Research Centre, where you can inspect objects from our collection and make use of our comprehensive research library.
On these pages you can also discover the research work we do, browse our directory for helpful information, and find out about donating an object to the museum.
Research using our collection and archives
On our blog
Written by museum staff, researchers and volunteers, our blog is packed with hidden treasures and behind-the-scenes stories.
Magic and early British cinema
You might not realise it, but early experiments in cinema are very closely linked to the work of magicians.
Conserving our collection
Conservator Vanessa Torres explains how a collection of daguerreotypes was re-housed.
Hidden treasures of our collection: Herbert Ponting’s camera
This unassuming cine camera has an incredible story to tell.
Adventures in audio—or how to get backstage with The Prodigy
Curator Annie Jamieson introduces you to our latest acquisition: the Midas XL3 mixing console, which has toured the UK with some of the world’s biggest bands and artists.
Using our collections: part 3
Researcher Kari Nixon writes about her work with material from our Kodak Collection.
Library highlights: Amateur film-making
Take a peek at some of the books and journals in our collection that deal with amateur film-making.
Forgotten women in STEM: Hedy Lamarr
Hedy Lamarr was one of the most beautiful women to ever grace the silver screen. She was also responsible for inventing technology which paved the way for WiFi and GPS.
Bradford pirates
Placement student Elaine Rhodes writes about her research into Bradford pirate radio.
Using our collections: part 1
Discover some of the exciting ways visitors use our collections—for research, general interest, and as inspiration for artistic projects.
Hidden treasures of our collection: snapshots of the last Tsar
Kendra, our Collections Assistant, shares an exciting discovery from the museum’s print archive: snapshots from the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II in May 1896.
Science Museum Group Journal
The Science Museum Group Journal is a peer-reviewed journal published twice yearly. It presents papers about science, its history, material culture, communication and presentation in museums.
Wired-up in white organdie: framing women’s scientific labour at the Burden Neurological Institute
Photographs of scientific workers at the Burden Neurological Institute ‘frame’ women’s labour in ways that devalue, obscure and even erase their contributions.
Sound and vision
Issue 7 of the Journal collects scholarly articles from sound and vision research across the Science Museum Group—with topics ranging from NHS glasses to the Victorian science of singing.
Capturing the song of the nightingale
The first outside broadcast made by the BBC from a natural location was the Nightingale broadcast of 19 May 1924. It was made possible by the Marconi-Sykes magnetophone (pictured).
Moments of danger: photography, institutions and the history of the future
Our exhibition Revelations: Experiments in Photography examined the relationship between scientific photography and art. What might this tell us about how we present, and thus create, history in a museum context?
