A protocol for multidisciplinary teams: combining art historical and scientific analysis to reconstruct the object history of Indian paintings at National Museums Scotland

Drawing on data from an ongoing case study at NMS, our paper reports on efforts to overcome disciplinary silos in museum work and research. We present a protocol for multidisciplinary work and an innovative framework to test its effectiveness, borrowing evaluation techniques from the social sciences.

NMS has embarked on a pilot study to develop methods for investigating a rare group of Indian paintings from Murshidabad, Bengal, in its collections. In 1766, Archibald Swinton (1731–1804), a captain in the East India Company, brought these paintings back to Scotland, where he displayed them on the walls of his stately dining room to remember his time in India.

We understand these paintings as sites of cultural contact between European customers and Bengali artisans. As a multidisciplinary team of in-house experts with backgrounds in paper and artefact conservation, photography, analytical and heritage science, and art history, we bring together scientific analyses of the physical objects and their (art)historical contextualisation to reconstruct the histories of these paintings.

An integral part of our study is the development of the first protocol for multidisciplinary working at NMS, including how to navigate disciplinary specifics, facilitate knowledge exchange between team members and create a shared vocabulary. We will apply two evaluation tools – HEART (Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention and Task Success) and SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) – to assess the effectiveness of our protocol for multidisciplinary teams at NMS. Our findings will help to enable synergies that can emerge from multidisciplinary work in everyday museum practice