Behind the scenes

It’s time to open window number 10 on your advent calendar….

Oh look, it’s a bell! The bell from Haddington’s grammar school, which closed in 1879,  to be more exact. Ding-dong merrily on high.

Thanks to everyone who left comments on my last blog. It’s great to know there are people out there who read this!

So back to museum news….as part of the development of the John Gray Centre, a few of us visited Callendar House in Falkirk on Monday. It contains a Museum and Archives and we discussed with Peter Stott, Head of Heritage and Learning, and Elspeth Reid, Archivist, the benefits and pitfalls of having two services within the one building. The working kitchen within Callendar House is amazing and we were given the opportunity to taste some old-fashioned Christmas Pudding! We also visited the Print Maker’s shop, which was based on Johnston and Son’s shop from Falkirk Town Centre - now Johnston Press who produce East Lothian News!

North Berwick High School held a Slave Trade exhibition in their library, supported by the Museums Service, over the first week in December. Georgina Brownlee, from the school’s History Department, organised the exhibition with her classes. The exhibition included objects, panels and images from the recent ‘Ports, Prisoners and Pirates’ exhibition at John Muir’s Birthplace alongside pupil’s work. Pupils wore ‘Happy to Help’ sashes at breaks and lunchtimes to answer visitor’s questions and a comments book reflected the enthusiasm of the school towards the topic. The pupils created a wonderful display. Photos should be available soon on Flickr!

And finally, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from all at the Museums Service. Speak to you again in 2009!

The Options Appraisals and Business Plans for Musselburgh and North Berwick have now been released for public viewing. They look at the best options for re-opening the museum in North Berwick and establishing a new museum in Musselburgh. The consultants, Jura, submitted the reports to East Lothian Councillors who have now asked for costings for the various proposals as suggested in the Business Plans.

It will be interesting to hear the public’s views on the various options. I’m a relative newcomer to the whole situation and so I missed the consultation stage but it seems that Jura got the views of a range of different people and have included these throughout their reports. There is still the opportunity for people to get involved so if you’re like me and missed out, then you can respond to these reports by getting in touch!

  I’ve been thinking about our museums blog alot recently. Should we continue with it? Does anyone really read it?

 I was asked to contribute to a recent study by a student at Leicester University which looked at why museums blog. The general consensus seemed to be that blogging by museums was still in its experimental stages but the potential was there to reach new audiences through it.

 I guess the advantage of a blog like this is that it allows us to tell the story of what goes on behind the museum buildings.

Many of our visitors and people involved with the museum service only see a tiny part of what goes on so I’m going to try and give more of an idea of the huge variety of things that happen in a busy, but small museums service!

Any comments on what you’d rather see, or hear about, would be most welcome!

It’s only 9 weeks until Christmas. Bet that scares you more than Hallowe’en! We are planning our Hallowe’en party at Prestongrange Museum at the moment. I delivered a pumpkin for Claire to carve yesterday so I’m waiting to see what wonderful images will appear - perhaps a Beam Engine?!

Jo, Sheila and I went to the Museums Association Conference from the 6th-8th of October. It was held in Liverpool, the current European Capital of Culture, and we were based right at the Albert Docks. The International Slavery Museum gave us lots to consider for our exhibitions planned for 2009 on the same topic. I thought the sections on present day music being influenced by African traditions were really thought-provoking.

It’s also Black History Month at the moment and we’re very proud that in the official BHM magazine, we are listed as one of the only museums in Scotland hosting an events programme. Any of you who attended our talk by Professor Geoff Palmer and Dr David Anderson, called ‘Slavery Past, Prejudice Present’ will agree that it’s a fascinating topic!

I suppose that’s quite a brief summary of what we’ve been up to in the museum service recently, only the highlights really as otherwise I’d be here all night! Happy Hallowe’en….

 The fact I have to open my office window every day and my cactus looks as if it’s dying tells me that summer is finally here! Only a few weeks until the school summer holidays start in Scotland and most people are sunburnt already.

At Prestongrange, David’s Red Hot Pokers are looking lovely and survived the hectic Three Harbours Arts Festival. The opening night saw the museum play host to wonderful choirs, dancers and musicians. Staff also got into the swing of things by dressing up as characters from the museum’s past. As Christine and Claire walked across the site it looked as if we’d suddenly gone back in time! Unfortunately we didn’t make it into the East Lothian Courier’s photographs. Better luck next time!

 In Dunbar, John Muir’s Birthplace continue their hectic schedule with a visit this week from pupils from Yosemite Valley School in California. A huge thanks goes to all the host families who have went out of their way to make the children feel at home whilst they are here! 

 Dunbar Townhouse is currently in a state of flux as the next exhibition, Band of Brothers, is due to open this week. If you happen to be passing, don’t let the scaffolding put you off, there’s lots of great things to see inside.

 Apart from that, plans for the John Gray Centre march on. Our online survey is now ready to roll. If you want to have a say in how the centre develops (it will include a museum, library and archives) then complete the online questionnaire.

As part of our Grundtvig Project I went on a trip to Compton Verney, an art gallery in Warwickshire, from 27th-29th of April.

The gallery is set in picturesque grounds and has a specially built learning centre - which I was very envious of! The gallery is a charity, funded by the Peter Moores Foundation, and only opened in 2004. As well as meeting with other partners from Italy and Hungary who are part of the project, we also had the chance for a tour of the galleries. At present their temporary exhibitions are by James Coleman and Alberto Giacometti. Both were presented really well and, although the James Coleman piece included a very strong Irish accent, all nationalities seemed to appreciate both!

Now onto the actual work of the Grundtvig project, the creation of the Our East Lothian website. Have a look and add your comments about one of our photographs - at the moment the focus is on World War Two.

I’m leaving. After nearly fourteen years it’s surprisingly hard to write those words without a twinge of regret. Museums have been my passion and working in East Lothian has been the largest chunk of my professional life. I will miss the place, the people, the collections, the things we have done and the exciting things we are planning to do. How could I not?

I’m leaving on a jet plane. Although I do know when I’ll be back again - in August, when I fly back to the UK to accompany the rest of my family back to New Zealand. And though I hate to leave, it’s also exciting: new job, new opportunities. One thing I have learned in my time here is that you have to grab oportunities when they present themselves - they may not recur. But as ever by doing one thing you close off the opportunity to do other things with the same resources of time or money. There’s no point worrying about what might have happened if other choices had been made. To quote CS Lewis in the Magician’s Nephew (and it’s not often that the Narnia books get quoted!):

Make your choice, adventurous stranger;
Strike the bell and bide the danger,
Or wonder, till it drives you mad,
What would have followed if you had

Still, I’ll be able to keep in touch. East Lothian will be just a hyperlink away. Unlike Charn.

I’ve thought on and off that it would be good to have something like an ‘object of the week’ on the site. But that’s a task I’ll delegate to someone else… before they all run and hide.

Meanwhile, how about a caption competition? I’ve spent some of today putting together an advert to go on the large visitor maps that will be going up round East Lothian shortly. In a small service like this one, you have to do a bit of everything. we don’t have a marketing person (or an admin person, or a finance person, or a human resources person* and so on). One of the pictures I was going to use was this one:

It occurs to me that we have a lot of pictures ripe for captioning (if that is a word). Something like, “…and this afternoon kids, we’re going to the museum!” perhaps?

No prizes, just kudos I’m afraid, but if you have any ideas the comment box is below.

* ‘Personnel person’ seems, well, too, erm, personal IYSWIM.

Also on Saturday, we held our Big Draw 2007, in which artst Jacquelyn Rixon led families in creating their own masterpieces using vegetable juices made from local vegetables, and using vegetables such as carrots as painting brushes! Participants created a large communal piece of art as well as smaller individual pieces of art. To form the link with Prestongrange, with its history of ceramics, our budding artists were encouraged to make cabbage leaf prints in clay. Similar cabbage leaf plates were made by the old pottery of Belfield’s in Prestonpans (see the thumbnail picture of one such plate in our collection); will the cabbage leaf plates created at this year’s Big Draw be the collectors items of the future?

The second leg of our pottery workshop (see blog entry passim) took place on Saturday, and we’re happy to report that all of the pieces that went into the kiln came out in one piece, thanks to the care and expertise of the ceramicist who kindly offered to fire them for us, namely Diana Hoare of North Berwick Community Centre. After an initial firing, the ceramics would usually be glazed and then returned to the kiln for a second firing. However, in this instance, and to avoid them having to wait an additional week or more, the children returned to paint their creations with a mixture of poster paint and pva glue (which gives the paint a slight sheen), and then take away their finished masterpieces that day.