Behind the scenes

 We’re obsessed with all things Scottish at the moment with 2009 being the year of Homecoming. I was at Knox Academy a few weeks ago doing sessions with their S1 pupils as they are creating their own exhibition for Homecoming. The pupils struggled to come up with famous Scottish people they actually wanted to research straight away. Many shook their head at David Tennant and pulled a face when Lorraine Kelly was mentioned! The queen of breakfast tv indeed!

 So the topic opened up to include a more general Scottish theme. What they came up with was interesting insight into how we view ourselves as a nation – Irn Bru, Haggis, Whisky, Tam O’Shanter, Sir Henry Raeburn, Andy Murray, William Wallace, and so the list goes on…I’m going tomorrow night to view the finished versions so I’ll report back (and hopefully add some photos to our Flickr site too).

John Muir’s Birthplace is also going Homecoming crazy this year with their programme of events. Their exhibition on at present is about John Muir’s links with Robert Burns. You should make a little trip along to see it, and if you’re lucky and can shove the children off it, you might get a chance to re-enact Tam O’Shanter on a stage. 

Wow, that’s twice I’ve managed to mention Tam O’Shanter during this post. But no one does Scottish better than the Americans so here’s my favourite version of the poem on YouTube. I like the fact Tam is wearing a baseball cap and that it got them extra credit in English lit.

Other museum news….Sheila’s been off to the Brunton to find all our paintings hanging about there, Ken is now working on a brand new loan box on fishing, the John Gray Centre plans roll on, and we’re about to recruit new seasonal Museum Assistants. Exciting times! If there’s any news in particular you’d like to hear about, let me know!

 Big news from the Museums Service…Kate is now back from maternity leave as our Principal Museums Officer! We are therefore nearly back to full strength now, although we still have a post vacant for our Assistant Museums Officer.

We will also be recruiting for seasonal Museum Assistants soon so we’ll have a whole new selection of faces. And we have a few new eager volunteers (more are always welcome!). I will endeavor to get at least one other person to write a blog. That’s my aim for the next year!

Holocaust Memorial Day

Did you know it’s Holocaust Memorial Day on the 27th of January? The theme for this year is ‘Stand Up to Hatred’. We’ve worked with Knox Academy to put photographs online of the models a Second year History class made to do with the Holocaust.

  P6 and P6/7 at King’s Meadow Primary in Haddington are also hosting an assembly on the day as part of a wider project. The pupils will be working with an artist and writer to create an exhibition which will be shown at Prestongrange Museum later in the year as part of the Slave Trade Exhibition.

February beckons…

February is Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History Month. We’ve put together a programme of activities for the month, which you’re more than welcome to come along to. In fact, we’d love it if you came along because as it’s the first year the Council have marked LGBT History Month we’re not sure what kind of turn out we’ll get! You can come along to the concert by Edinburgh Gay Men’s Chorus, or join OurStory Scotland for a fun afternoon of storytelling around a ‘camp’ fire. 

 Anyway, as part of this, I am trying to identify either people or places in East Lothian which have a connection to the LGBT community. Any suggestions? (Just to beat you to it…Rhona Cameron.)

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.

Our recent adult art classes at Prestongrange were a big success, and they culminated last Friday in an exhibition of the work produced by the participants, few of whom had ever attempted formal art, but were encouraged to do so by the enthusiasm and encouragement of the class tutor, Jacquelyn Rixon.

Working with materials that have a connection with Prestongrange’s past, such as soap, (char)coal, sand and clay, all of the artists produced engaging and relevant work. The results can be seen at Prestongrange Museum until the end of October.

While the adult art class was a pilot project, we hope to continue it in the future. For more details, please contact Jacquelyn Rixon at jacquelyn.rixon@virgin.net

See Europe A La Carte’s blog entry about the classes…

Textille artist Malcolm Cruickshank, who has created the wonderful kilts on display at Prestongrange Museum’ Power House exhibition space, came in on Friday to do a feltmaking workshop for 5 to 12 year olds. It was a big success, and some of the participants’ creations are pictured below.

More info about Malcolm’s show, Haute Kilture, which is at Prestongrange until 19th August is here.

Also, see more about the show here, in the blog entry from July 28th.

A few weeks ago, I attended a masterclass, organised by the nice people at Leicester University’s Museum Studies department, entitled “Design As Interpretation”. Exploring museum architecture and design, and their role in providing context for the interpretation of a museum’s objects, the masterclass attracted attendees from Norway, Italy, Spain, Hungary and Portugal, as well as the UK, and comprised museum professionals, educators, in-house designers, interpretation specialists etc..

The “tutors” were three architects from a US practice that specialises in museums and exhibit designs; a principal of Metaphor, who design exhibits in the UK and elsewhere; a principal at Land Design Studio, exhibition designers; and a principal at lighting designers Sutton Vane Associates. The theme of the week was using exhibit design to enhance the meaning(s) of an exhibition: the lead “tutor” used the term embody. In other words, how an exhibition is put together should embody the exhibition’s themes. This took in such ideas as audience definition, conceptual framework, narrative, procession and circulation, design vocabulary, materiality, interactivity, graphics, lighting, and media.

In teams of six, we were given three days to come up with a presentation proposing a change of use for a space (of our choosing) on the university campus. The changes proposed had to relate to a broadly-defined theme that was chosen at random; in our case the theme was “connections”. Using model-making materials, a laptop, digital camera, glue, scissors, paper and coloured pens, our team had to develop a proposal to remodel the space (we chose a busy lobby).

From our work, and through talking to the design professionals, it became clear that spaces (and especially, by inference, museum spaces) can be appropriately enhanced when the designers and museums professionals collaborate and share ideas. This is preferable to the scenario where an architect will design a building with little reference to the end users: the example of the National Museum Of Ireland in County Mayo was given, where the architects decided to install a large glass window in a section that ended up housing costumes, and which actually required low light levels. The huge window had to be screened off later.

If, therefore, the museum staff and the designers and architects of future East Lothian museum spaces could get a chance to meet and discuss, then this may serve to enhance the final result. With proposals to remodel two of our museums on the table, and plans to build a new museum space in Haddington under way, this was quite timely.

Following on from the previous post, I note that the Brooklyn Museum have their own MySpace site. Mind you, it’s filtered from here under the category ‘Personals and Dating’. This seems like a cunning plan (the site, not the filtering, that is), but my daughters and their friends all use Bebo instead, so maybe we should look at some sort of presence there…

Collections Online meets Web 2.0

I wrote a little about this earlier, but now seems a good time to expound at slightly greater length. Like many museum professionals I have been wondering (for years now it seems) about the best way of providing online access to collections. The objective has always seemed, at least in part, to force visitors to come to your site, which then becomes the sole point of contact. But the great advantage of digital information is the ease with which it can be copied and the ability to deliver the same content through a variety of different media and in a range of differing contexts. Couple that with the fact that the World Wide Web allows content to be drawn in from anywhere, enabling the creative re-use of resources originally built for quite other purposes; the growth of ‘sociable technologies’ like blogs, wikis, YouTube, MySpace and Bebo; and the widespread deployment of tools that mean creating online content is now easy and requires no (or little) technical knowledge beyond that required to use a word processor, and we can see that there is now a world of shared content out there already being created, used, re-used and re-shaped. Perhaps its time to stop thinking about re-inventing the wheel and to take a free ride instead?

Flickr.com is a web site that enables people to publish and share digital images – but in addition it allows people to contribute to the information associated with the images by adding comments and notes, additional tags (i.e. keywords) and to add individual images to their personal favourites. Museums across Scotland already have large quantities of digital images of objects in their collections (many created through Scran), but lack the knowledge or resources to make these images and the associated information available through their own web sites. Flickr.com provides a simple (and free) alternative.

At the end of August I uploaded a trial batch of 51 random images taken from our collections, together with the captions that had been written for them for Scran. I included their museum accession number and a number of keyword tags, and made them publicly available under a Creative Commons licence. The Flickr user account allows you to see at a glance how many times your images have been viewed (with the usual caveats about the effects of intermediate caching); how many have been ‘favorited’; and how many comments visitors have left. In the five weeks from August 23rd the 51 images were viewed a total of 365 times (ranging from 69 for the Red Cross Nurse to 4 for the portrait of James Miller); two of the images had been ‘favorited’; one had a comment requesting further information; and I received a publication request for an image. I took no steps to publicise this experiment, but I did make use of the code Flickr provides to put a changing random selection of your photos on your web site which link through to the individual images, both here and on the main museums site.

A few weeks is too short a time to fully assess the effects of making museum content available in this way, but I intend to keep adding to the photostream over the next year. Perhaps by then some patterns will be emerging – particularly if other museums also begin to make use of Flickr too. For the moment it is at least clear that we can reach some people in this way that otherwise we probably wouldn’t reach at all.

I wonder if I have to include this in my SPI statictics?

Note: the Flickr.com free account allows you to upload 20MB of images per month and has other restrictions. The Pro account with 2GB of uploads per month and few restrictions costs $24.95 per year – about £13.50!

Update: I was quite wrong about the statistics – 365 is the number of times all or part of the photostream has been viewed. The individual views of images are separate from that, and there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to total these individual image views. Anyone know the answer to that?

The education department of our museums service was lucky enough to receive two grants this spring from the Scottish Museums Council; one to institute our new Museums On The Move project, and one to begin a Podcasting project.  The former is now well under way, with equipment purchased, and community exhibitions already undertaken.  The latter is finally getting off the ground, though, as podcasting implicitly involves lots of computer hardware and software, it’s been slow-going.  We’re just about ready to start making our podcasts though, and over the next few weeks, we plan to visit schools and sign them up to help us create new audio content for our existing tours and to create new tours, and to work with a local day centre to record a series of audio memories of East Lothian that will appear on our site at regular intervals, ready for subscribers to download.

As a sort of proof-of-concept, and a chance to try out some of our new hardware and software, I’ve created an initial download (can you call it a podcast when there’s only one of them?  Lots of other sites seem to…) about my recent trip to the GEM Conference in Durham.  It’s only short, but it gave me the chance to use the software that came free with our mic and mixer (Audacity), and to use some of the copyright-free audio loops that also came free.

With luck, this will be the first of many.  It also appears on our podcasting page on the main site, where I’m currently setting up RSS and Atom feeds. 

Download East Lothian Museums podcast.