The three papers that follow are the result of a scheme set up by the National Maritime Museum (NMM) to encourage new research on its collections, and are presented as examples of how museum collections can open up new areas of academic research. They are also models of the kinds of work the NMM will further encourage in the future.

As a significant location in the history of science, in particular through the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, which forms a key part of the NMM complex, and as a museum with rich holdings relating to the history of science, technology and medicine, the NMM has long fostered successful research and publication in these areas. Yet the museum does not necessarily feature high on researchers' lists of key sources of relevant and interesting material, despite housing a collection of nearly two and a half million items, including internationally important holdings of astronomical, navigational, horological and other scientific equipment, as well as cartographic material, manuscripts, ship models and plans, and prints, drawings and paintings on a wide range of subjects.

In recent years, therefore, the Museum has sought to make its scientific collections more widely available through the publication of scholarly catalogues, beginning with Elly Dekker's Globes at Greenwich (1999), as well as through online initiatives (www.nmm.ac.uk/collections). As these have shown, the NMM collections relate not only to Greenwich and the Royal Observatory's historic role, but also to broader histories of science and technology, as well as to areas as broad-ranging as economic and business history, the history of production and consumption, imperial history and exploration. These, therefore, are all contexts that the museum is seeking to promote in its current creation of a research centre in the history of science and technology.

The wish to raise awareness of the scholarly potential of the NMM's collections, coupled with the aim of further promoting the use of material culture as both subject and source of evidence in the history of science, technology and medicine, led the museum to set up a programme of research internships in 2004. This scheme has aimed to encourage new researchers – primarily undergraduate and postgraduate students – to carry out short, focused projects relating to the museum's collections. It also complements the long-standing NMM fellowships aimed at researchers further advanced in their careers.

These papers are the result of some, but by no means all, of the projects completed to date, and illustrate many aspects of the scheme. For those still exploring possible future directions in the field, potential interns have been able to choose from a range of promising topics suggested by NMM staff. Thus George Roberts's study of the work of George Fisher has used manuscript and other sources from the NMM to expand and reassess Fisher's significance in mid-nineteenth-century work on the chronometer, a crucial piece of navigational technology, by drawing on a group of materials that had not previously been explored in any depth.

Alternatively, applicants already engaged in research have been able to suggest projects of their own, generally dovetailing with doctoral work. This was the case, for example, with the internship undertaken by Sarah Dry. Here the relationship has been rather different, with the intern bringing knowledge and resources from outside to bear on the NMM collections and on subjects of specific interest to the museum. A benefit for the museum is that interns bring their own perspectives and the latest research methodologies to bear on the collections.

The three papers cover the period from the early nineteenth century to the 1930s, but apart from this loose chronological grouping it is interesting to note the emergence of a range of common themes from these otherwise distinct projects. Given the nature of the institution hosting the scheme, for instance, it is not surprising that the papers centre around science and technology in practical contexts, whether this be the development of technologies for ships and aircraft or the deployment of scientific equipment in fishing communities. And in particular, of course, it is the material culture of science and technology that is being discussed – again an agenda that, as a museum, the NMM is bound to promote.

Likewise, it is only to be expected that a recurring theme is the work of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. By the nineteenth century the Royal Observatory had become the foremost scientific institution of the British state, with its head, the Astronomer Royal, seen as a key authority to be consulted on a wide range of scientific and technical issues. So it is not surprising to find the figure of George Airy, seventh Astronomer Royal, cropping up again and again in the discussions and debates of the day, as he does in several places in these papers.

Away from Greenwich, however, an increasing number of broadly scientific institutions came into being during the nineteenth century, within both the military and the expanding administrative reach of the British government. In these papers we come across nascent bodies such as the Meteorological Department of the Board of Trade (later the Met Office), Kew Observatory (many of the functions of which were later taken over by the National Physical Laboratory) and the Admiralty Compass Department (later the Admiralty Compass Observatory). Among other matters, the early history and roles of these bodies testify to the continued negotiation of questions of authority, expertise and legitimacy and what it meant to be ‘scientific’, a repeated motif in these papers. On the one hand, for instance, Sophia Davis's exploration of the work of the Admiralty Compass Observatory on the design of compasses for aircraft touches on the rhetorical manoeuvres involved in ensuring scientific legitimacy for that institution's work. On the other, we find discussed in Sarah Dry's piece the issue of the credibility and legitimacy of the ‘practical’ day-to-day knowledge of fishermen in distinction from, as well as in tandem with, that derived from more theoretical and ‘official’ scientific speculation.

Another notable theme that runs through these pieces is the interconnectedness of different technological developments. The nineteenth century was a period not only of significant British imperial expansion but also of technological advance in the arenas of shipbuilding, navigation and gunnery, to name just three. As these papers show, the different developments in these areas were closely connected. The increasing use of iron in ships and the greater and greater firepower of their guns, for instance, had significant, often problematic, effects on the instruments the ships carried. So we encounter here the need to ensure the reliability of compasses and chronometers on ships whose magnetic characteristics might render those instruments untrustworthy. The introduction of new technologies often had a downside, therefore, with existing technologies needing to be redesigned or resituated as a result. As Sophia Davis shows, this might go even further, for she reveals how the fundamental question of what a compass should be lay at the heart of adapting this centuries-old yet often unreliable piece of equipment for the new context of the aircraft.

These, then, are some of the themes that draw together the papers presented here. Readers will no doubt pick up others. In the end, however, if there is just one thing that we could wish to come from this, it is that researchers continue to appreciate the value of researching the material culture of science, technology and medicine as a key strand in future historiography.