Behind the scenes

 Talking to various museums people at a conference recently, it’s interesting the amount who haven’t started using social networking sites as yet, or indeed the wider internet in general. I thought I’d just remind people of what we’ve done and what’s worked well…

We launched our Facebook site a few months ago. It was easy peasy to set up and it’s now one of my favourites to update as it just takes 2 seconds, reaches everyone immediately and is a good way of sharing info. We now have 42 fans on Facebook! Please follow us if you haven’t done so already - search for ‘East Lothian Council Museums Service’. We used the Museum of the University of St Andrews as our model for this so check them out too.

Our websites are operated using Website Baker. It’s just like using a word processor to update your pages. I just trained two people on it this morning so we can update the John Gray Centre website.

 Our YouTube site definitely needs more work. It’s one of the things I’m going to get round to after Christmas - I promise! At the moment it has a variety of films, many to do with the loco No 6. We’ve had a little spurt in people subscribing and requesting to be friends recently without us doing anything really!

Flickr remains as one of our most used sites. We recently posted photos of the Suffragette March and Multi-Cultural Day, both which were attended by lots of people and it was a really easy way of sharing the photos. One tip - always give each photo a title and description. I hate it when photos are up but you have no idea what they are of!

Survey Monkey has also been our saviour on many an occasion. It’s a website which lets you carry out questionnaires free of charge online. We pay for the more advanced service because of the amount we use it. We’ve used it many times this season to analyse visitor surveys, carry out consultation with communities and to gain feedback from events. It’s so simple to use and you can download reports containing graphs, percentages and pie-charts which make reporting back much easier. Perfect for those strapped for time to do proper evaluations.

Our collections are also on Scran - you can access this free from any library and it contains collections from museums, galleries, archives and libraries from across Scotland.

We haven’t branched out to using Twitter yet. I don’t know if it’s really for us, but we’ll see…

Any other suggestions as to sites other people have used that are useful, please leave a comment and spread the word!

I thought it was time to give a quick update on the John Gray Centre. You might have noticed, if you live or work in Haddington, that there is some activity happening outside the planned location on Lodge Street. Archaeological digging started in September - they’ve found nothing exciting as yet. No huge finds of treasure sadly.

Studioarc, the museum designers, are progressing with plans. As an Education Officer, I’m obviously really interested in the interactive side of the museum and it looks like it’s going to be really successful on that side of things. So far we have dressing up, postcard stamping, helping farmer John with his grandparent’s strange objects, unlocking secret boxes and much more!! 

I visited Wallyford P3s recently to ask for their advice on one interactive element called ‘Senses of the Sea’ (you might remember me mentioning it in an earlier blog). Their ideas were priceless, here’s a taster:

Smells of the sea - fish, seaweed, custard(?), seals

Tastes - hotdogs, chips, ice-cream, salt, beers…

Sounds - Children playing, splashes, laughing, speedboats, “icescream van jingle”

Touch - shells, sand, water, starfish, rubbish

I was particularly intrigued by one thing they all kept suggesting - “cheona”. Have you guessed what it is yet?

Of course, tuna.

They were a delightful class and their teacher Miss Reeves had them all enthusiastically talking about science, would you believe? I’ve asked if they will all be our tour guides when we open!