Almond Valley is an independent museum dedicated to preserving and interpreting the history and environment of West Lothian. This area of Scotland lies between Edinburgh and Glasgow and was once dependent on the mining and farming industries. Since the creation of a new town in Livingston during the 1960''s there have been many changes. New industries have been introduced, people have moved into the area and large amounts of farmland have been used for housing. The 10-hectare museum site was once a farm but is now surrounded by the new town. The site contains a watermill, a range of 18th century farm buildings, riverside walks, fields and wildlife areas. The museum project began in the 1970''s with a campaign to preserve the old watermill that had been derelict for many years. From this arose a community farm in which families, children and school groups cared for farm animals, and collected old equipment from surrounding farms. A succession of training schemes restored and upgraded the old farm buildings, whilst a museum-based training scheme collected objects from West Lothian''s shale oil mining industry. In 1990, the local authority oversaw the formation of the Almond Valley Heritage Trust to bring together all of these activities and operate as a professionally staffed museum. An annual grant from the local authority now covers about a third of operating costs, the balance being earned from admission charges, shop, tearoom and birthday parties. The Trust has overseen a programme of development that has included construction of a new museum building, education and visitor facilities, play areas, a narrow-gauge railway, and many other improvements, As a result visitor numbers have steadily increased from 10,000, to more than 80,000 visitors per year. The farm and it''s animals have always been very popular to families and children but it has proved much more difficult to interest young people in the history of the area. Over the years, museum staff have devised various games, crafts, computer programmes and other small-scale interactive displays to involve family visitors in the museum collection and their local history. As a result of these works, the museum won a number of awards for innovative interpretation and education work. Experience of these small projects was applied to the major museum redevelopment project that began in 1999. This pound;500,000 scheme was funded by grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund, European Regional Development Fund, the local council and local enterprise company. It involved the extension of the main museum building, the construction of a picnic barn for visiting school groups and enlarging of the tearoom. All the existing museum displays, which had been installed at great cost less than ten years previously, were removed and replaced with interpretation designed to interest and engage families with young children. In most areas of the museum, objects and display boards are combined with games, activities and interactive features. For example, an area considering local geology places a display of fossils within a simulated quarry environment and combines this with caves and tunnels that children can explore, jigsaws, rubbings, feely boxes, computer interactives and tanks containing the living relatives of the fossil creatures. This mix of play features and conventional displays provides something to engage and interest both children and their parents or grandparents. This same approach is adopted elsewhere in the museum when considering local topics such as the shale oil industry, social history and public health. Other areas of the museum are equipped as laboratory or workshop areas to serve as venue for a changing programme of activities, scientific experiments and crafts. A professional design practice was initially commissioned to pull together the museum''s ideas for each display. This proved expensive and inflexible, and was soon abandoned in favour of a do-it-yourself approach. Detailed designs were worked up in-house then realised by a small team of local craftsmen and artists directly employed by the museum for the duration of the project. This way of working provided opportunity to experiment with designs as work progressed, provided total financial and creative control, and ultimately proved much less costly. It was however enormously time consuming, taking over two years to complete, and distracted museum staff from other duties. Not everything was right first time, and even after the re-opening of the main museum building and being named as Scottish Museum of the Year, we continue to change and improve many parts of the display. Perhaps one of the greatest legacies of the project is the expertise and experience gained by museum staff that continues to be applied in improving displays and tackling new projects.