Most Deaf Museums collected their exhibits by networking and sometimes even by 'dumpster diving: they rescued objects from garbage bins.  

Ownership is important for Deaf Museums, too. Who owns Deaf history? Who can display it, who can tell its stories?

What exhibits a Deaf Museums uses, depends on a number of questions:

• • Is it a physical or virtual Museum or a combination: a hybrid Museum?
  • How much space does the Museum have? 
  • What story does the Museum want to tell? A story about Deaf Education, about a specific School for the Deaf, a Deaf Club, a specific Deaf person, or all of the above?
  • What objects can the Museum collect? By asking, finding, saving, or buying?

Exhibits of most Deaf Museums include photos, videos, technical equipment, books, magazines. Most also include items used by deafblind people - now or in the past. 

Exhibits about deafblind people at the Deaf Heritage Centre UK 

Museum of Deaf Education, NL

The Museum of Deaf Education in the Netherlands unfortunately had to close in 2021 because the old buildings of the School for the Deaf in Sint Michielsgestel (NL) were sold.

The collection - now in storage -  started out with objects, documents, photos and videos of the school for the Deaf in Sint Michielsgestel. Piet Borneman who worked at the school as the Head Nurse, started collecting objects out of personal interest. There was no Museum yet, there were no plans even for a Museum.
Once it became known that Piet was collecting, other schools for the Deaf contacted him - usually when they were moving to a new location. "Piet, if you want our books, desks, photos, come and get them, now because everything will be thrown out." Piet became good at 'dumpster diving' and saved many irreplaceable documents and objects from destruction. 

When the Museum was opened in 2015, the exhibits included many objects and books from other schools for the Deaf in the Netherlands. For the full story, see elsewhere on this website. 

Because of Piet's personal interests, the collection of the Museum also included examples of hearing aids and audiometric equipment through the ages. 

Finnish Museum of the Deaf, Kuurojen Museo

The Finnish Museum of the Deaf started out by telling the story of Carl Oscar Malm, the founder of deaf education in Finland . It exhibited the donations given by Fritz and Maria Hirn to the Museum in 1907. The Hirns were students of Carl Oscar Malm, and they donated photographs and materials dating back to their school years. The Museum's collections increased gradually and the first exhibition, Carl Oscar Malm's  room, was opened to the public for the first time on 12 February 1915.

Today, the museum's permanent exhibition is still dedicated to the life of  Malm.

In addition, changing exhibitions and the web-museum show the history of the sign language community  in Finland. 

The room of Carl Oscar Malm in the Museum

Deaf Heritage Centre, UK

The collection of the Deaf Heritage Centre in Manchester is a national collection that consists of numerous artefacts, deaf artwork and paper archive collections of all kinds.

See the video of Maureen Jackson, one of the volunteers working at the Deaf Heritage Centre UK, who tells us about the Centre's collection and one of its exhibits that was saved from destruction: a sweater with fingerspelling (BSL with English Voice Over, December 2021): 

Ownership is more than just who has an object or artefact in his or her possession. Who owns - and can tell - the overall story of the Deaf minority in a hearing world? The big overall story as well as the 'small' individual stories? In the past, much of Deaf History was claimed by hearing professionals, hearing educators: they told the stories from their hearing perspectives. 

Museums, historians and curators who claim ownership may do this from the best of intentions: "We know how to preserve your artefacts", "We know how to tell your story." But this can be seen as or can actually be a sign of paternalism: "We'll do this for you, because we can do this better than you can, because we can tell your stories better than you can. "Today's Museums and curators are aware of this and will work with the actual owners of artefacts and history. 

Ownership is important for Deaf Museums too, for three more reasons:

• • When a Deaf Museum works together with a mainstream Museum or with Museum professionals, both parties will have to work together in a way that avoids paternalism. Both parties must respect each other's expertise.
  • It is important that the local, regional or national Deaf community is involved in the creation and running of the Deaf Museum. Deaf people of all ages should feel from the start that the Museum is 'their' Museum, that they co-own the Museum and are responsible for its survival.
  • When Deaf Museums want to tell a specific story in an exhibition, maybe the story of the Deaf LHBTI community or Deaf people of colour, or maybe even Deaf education, they must take into account that these stories are owned by these groups. "Nothing about us, without us" is relevant for subgroups too.  

For sign language users, we can call 'oral history': 'signed history'.

Stories can be used to support other materials. An example: a Museum can show an antique text-telephone and add one or more stories told by people who actually used these phones in the past. This will make the object come to life.

It will also make people aware of the important role that the text-telephone, or technology in general, played in the history and the emancipation of Deaf people. 

A Museum can also use stories instead of objects in our exhibitions.  The stories can be personal memories, poems, jokes - as long as they support or illustrate the story that we want to tell.

On the Deaf Museum's website, we have collected a number of 'signed' stories from different countries, see: https://www.deafmuseums.eu/index.php/en/resources/all-resources/category/personal-memories

Further Reading: 

• Filming Deaf Stories

• Against Audism in Interviews with Deaf Holocaust Survivors

Most Deaf Museums do not have the resources for the proper - and safe! - storage of documents and objects. 
Unique objects and documents can easily get lost, stolen or damaged. 

Unique objects and photos at the Tommaso Pendola Museum in Siena

Many Deaf Associations have started to digitise and archive national documents and magazines. This is almost always done by volunteers. Each group and organisation uses its own system to do this. Not all archives are accessible online. You can find an overview of these groups elsewhere on this website. 

Two examples:

 Archives of Deaf History Scotland

Archives of "Historie Doven Rotterdam" NL

  Digitizing Deaf Magazines and Documents

One of the partners in the Deaf Museums project, DeafStudio (Slovakia) had a large number of old magazines for the Deaf. They decided that they would digitise these magazines and make them available in an online archive.  

At first, the plan was to do the scanning of the magazines by hand, maybe by volunteers. They did some research and found a university that had a robot that could do this for them, quickly and cheaply. So instead of using volunteers who could maybe scan 600 pages per week, they had a robot scan the magazines. Ultimately, the robot scanned 6410 pages from  331 magazines, in just 2 weeks. 

To make the information in the scanned articles accessible, the digitised magazines were published as 'flipping books', on their website.

Finnish Museum of the Deaf

In 2020 the exhibits of the Finnish Museum of the Deaf were catalogued and digitised by contract. What of the collections were revealed when one of the boxes in the collection was opened?

Finnish Sign Language and Finnish subtitles.