Inspired by a seminar on visitors using their own mobiles within a heritage site (February 2018, HQS Wellington with Info-Point), iMuse has experimented with creating a scratchcard of the Reading Abbey Gateway. This was timed for its opening after extensive HLF-funded refurbishment in Spring 2018 and was aimed at illustrating how ‘heritage’ can be interpreted in different ways, especially to highlight ‘restoration’ versus ‘conservation’ versus …. Try it at .Besides being bit of fun, it is hoped (but not yet tried other than tweeting to those participating in the #Reading21 project) that the involvement of ‘scratching’ will encourage taking a look at the object/scene.

Techie stuff – open source software illustrating the technique is available and has been used in the example above. If you go to that site and right click you can view and save the source. We are working on a way that a site’s visitors could select say a historic image from the site, take a photo to overlay and ‘scratch off’ themselves.