Behind the scenes

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.

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.

To accompany the Prestoungrange Gothenburg’s exhibition of pottery, we recently held a ceramics workshop at one of our museums. Antipodean ceramicist Rosie Little led 15 children in a hands-on introduction to slabbing, coiling and extruding terracotta clay. The results will be fired in a kiln and decorated in two weeks’ time. Some photos from the workshop appear above. Click on the thumbnails to see each picture.

Museums are about things, stuff, objects, artefacts whatever you want to call them. The collections store in Haddington has somewhere in the region of 25,000 objects in it, from the everyday (a griddle pan), to the unusual (a stone anchor), from the beautiful (an Edwardian wedding dress) to the utilitarian (a piece tin). How on earth do we know where everything is? What it comes down to is have you ever thought about what happens when something is given to a museum? It isn’t just a case of find some space on a shelf and leave it there, to be forgotten about and gather dust. Objects are identified, numbered, named (not as simple as you might think – is it a spade or a shovel?), cleaned, measured, stored and recorded on a database. Sometimes there is even the opportunity to do some research on the object. But this all takes time, energy and enthusiasm. We benefit from the help of volunteers like Hazel (pictured) in the store, who has been involved with the Museums for a number of years. Over the next months and years we will be looking for more volunteers in the museum store, so watch this space!

As a postscript to this blog we were shocked and saddened to hear of the sudden death of another invaluable volunteer, archaeologist, keen supporter of East Lothian’s heritage, and friend, Norma Buckingham last week. Norma had helped in the store, with exhibitions, research, opening nights – just about anything. Her glamour, humour and good spirits will be sadly missed.

I’ve been invited to attend a mini-conference at Hochschule Bremen on using mobile technologies and user-contributed content in developing guided tours of heritage sites.  Let me first observe that Bremen is not an easy place to get to (or indeed away from) if the other end of your journey is Edinburgh. My round trip to attend this mini-Conference at the Hochschule Bremen involves flying from Edinburgh to Luton, then on from Luton to Bremen. The return leg – starting with getting up at 5am – involves a train journey from Bremen to Hamburg, another journey out to the airport, then a flight to Birmingham, and finally a flight back to Edinburgh.

So here I am now in the famed Luton Airport (immortalised by Lorraine Chase, but latterly more famous with a voice-over by Tony Robinson). This is the first time I’ve been in Luton Airport (or as it now grandly titles itself London Luton) since 1973, when I was a mere child and was flying out with my family on a package holiday to Tunisia – the first time I had been abroad. I can remember very little about it, apart from the fact that it was with Horizon Holidays (who later went bust) and that the garishly-painted plane we boarded was named ‘Halcyon Days’. I suspect it’s changed quite a lot in the intervening thirty-four years.

The EasyJet flight down from Edinburgh was fine – no frills needed on such a short journey, after all. Unfortunately, I’m now left with a couple of hours wait before I can check in. Oh well, at least there’s somewhere to site down. I may treat myself to something to eat shortly.

It’s a long time since I posted anything, but at last I’ve got around to writing up ‘What I did on my holidays’. I’d saved up my annual leave so I could visit my brother in New Zealand in July - it’s such a long way that you need to go for a good while to make the long journey there and back worthwhile. But don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you with the details of the journey and the many failings of British Airways. Well, not right now, anyway.

One of the stranger consequences of presenting at Museums and the Web in April was being buttonholed after my talk by Wallis Barnicoat from Te Papa, the national museum of New Zealand, who was interested in what I’d been saying about our project working with many partners, most of them small, volunteer-dependent museums. I fooloishly mentioned that I would be in New Zealnd in July, and she immediately asked me if I could come and speak to her team. For a moment or two the thought “But I’ll be on holiday” struggled with my desire to tell people about the good things we’ve been doing. The latter won easily, though, and I agreed. The exact details of how I would get from Wanganui to Wellington and back, and when, were arranged later by email.

I ended up recapitulating my mw2007 talk for the museum development team in Te Papa in the morning, and repeating (a slightly amended version of) my presentation at Digital Dialogues in June to a larger group - including people from elswhere in Te Papa as well as the National Library and National Archives - in the afternoon. The thematic link between the two is that technology available freely (or at least very cheaply) enables us all to do things both alone and in collaboration that only a few years ago would have seemed to be well beyond our capacity and certain to be absurdly expensive. In particular we have ways of engaging with existing and new audiences that we couldn’t have developed ourselves - sometimes it’s just a question of looking at things from a different angle to see how we can use them. The talks went pretty well, though I was asked some hard questions, particularly by the afternoon crowd. That’s good as it keeps you on your toes and gets you thinking. I feel I can always answer any question - provided that “I don’t know” counts as an answer :-).

What is encouraging for us in East Lothian is to see that even a small local museum service can innovate and do things that others will look to copy. We can be a model for larger institutions, here and abroad; we have things to say and to teach. Sometimes the lack of resources is itself a spur to new ways of working (that’s management-speak for ‘necessity is the mother of invention’).

A slight disappointment was that I saw more of the offices than I did of the museum. But I can’t really complain - after all, I can now say that our influence reaches right around the world! What I haven’t done, though, (and in some ways I am writing this to remind myself to do so) is to follow up the contacts I made in NZ. There’s always potential for collaboration in new projects - in fact in writing this I’ve just had an idea, but I’m keeping it secret for now…

A belated follow-up to the last posting. The day went well, the audience laughed when I wanted them to, and didn’t laugh when I wasn’t expecting it. I even managed to keep to time, despite having about 55 slides. So job done, and I got to visit the Dulwich Picture Gallery as well on Saturday morning. The fact that owing to part of the Northern Line being closed I missed my train home and had to wait two hours in King’s Cross Station was merely an added bonus.

There were a couple of slightly jarring moments. First when someone from the Tate was talking about a project for which they had been sponsored by BT and mentioned such sponsorship as a way forward for other museums. Errrm, no, not really. Big national institutions may be able to get sponsorship from the likes of British Telecom, but for the rest of us it is neither so easy nor so lucrative. I don’t expect to see major corporate sponsorship of, say, the Inversneckie Teaspoon Museum (© Graham Turnbull). Later, someone else had a flexible attitude as to what constitutes a question. Perhaps making a blatant commercial pitch in the Q&A session is not the best of ideas. Tacking “What do you think?” on the end doesn’t really make it a question, you know.

I was very interested in the digital photography project that the V&A have been running within the museum. People (though I recall that it seemed to be principally aimed at families) were given digital cameras to take round the museum and encouraged to take photographs, which they could then take back to the education centre, download and print. They could also work on the images on a computer (aided by digital artists brought in by the V&A) to create new images which could then be put onto objects such as T-shirts and key-rings. I assume there was a charge for this, but I can’t recall if that was mentioned. The whole project was very staff-intensive and must have been quite expensive, though it wouldn’t be as expensive for us as we wouldn’t have to cope with the number of visitors that the V&A does. It’s a great means of getting people to look at the objects in a different way. One thing I wanted to know was what they did with all then photographs taken by the participants - did they keep them? Certainly no-one got to take away the digital originals as far as I could see, but rather they only got prints (and the other stuff if they had wanted to do that). I’d have thought it would have been nice for people to take away the digital images and put them up on Flickr or on their Bebo or MySpace site. That’s what we will be doing in our John Muir’s Dunbar project - but of course we have no copyright issues with regard to works of art that may be the subject of the photographs.

This Friday I’ll be in London giving one of the presentations at Digital Dialogues (not this one by the way). My title is ‘Repurposing the wheel’, and I’m beginning to wonder if I sound a bit like a stuck record on the subject of making use of the huge range of free (or at least very cheap) applications and services that are now available to everyone (including museums) to make content available and to engage with new and existing audiences. No matter. Many still seem to think that putting anything on the internet must cost huge sums of money, and are either put off by that or happily hand over great wedges of cash, for stuff that really isn’t worth, and shouldn’t cost, that much.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some web projects that will rightly cost a lot of money, but for most of us the major cost (and what in the end really counts for the visitor) is creating the content. The people best-placed to do that are the people who know the collections - the museum’s own staff - and the process of creation therefore has to be easy. We can’t expect all our staff to become web developers. Mind you, we shouldn’t stop them either.

This is what I’ve tried to do with our web sites. I’ve used a simple, free, content management system, Website Baker, for the main sites, and used the free WordPress here for the blog. I’ve made use of Flickr for our images (and as a means of tapping into the existing huge Flickr photo-sharing community) and YouTube for our video (ditto), and other members of the museums service have also been contributing. With a small number of staff in a small service there is no ‘web team’ - we’re all it, and sharing the load is essential (though inevitably some bear a greater share of the burden than others).

There’s no special reason for the picture - I just thought for once I’d include an image - this is from a set taken by participants in a workshop at John Muir’s Birthplace recently. I just rather like it. You can see the others on our Flickr page.

Update: Sigh. It looks like the Museums Association, with scant regard for how the web works or any idea of archiving data, remove events from their web site after they’ve taken place. Not very helpful for anyone wanting to review what’s going on in the sector, is it?

You may think it’s always hot and sunny here in California, but two weeks into my staff exchange at the John Muir National Historic Site (JMNHS) here in Martinez, and I’ve seen every kind of weather so far!

The idea of running staff exchanges between the Birthplace and John Muir’s family home in Martinez was first discussed as far back as 2004. Dunbar and Martinez were ‘twinned’ several years earlier and visits from Dunbar Grammar School pupils have already taken place. It was thought therefore that through our staff exchanges we could build on the existing good relationship between our two towns, not to mention the benefit for both sides to be had from an exchange of ideas and for personal development.

I have been living in Martinez now for over two weeks and feel I’m now settling into the routine. Group visits, school parties, shop sales, team meetings and, most importantly, assisting visitors - one of the main things I’ve learned so far is that working at the front line in the museum sector/heritage industry is basically the same everywhere. Mastering the till in foreign currency (with tax) and getting used to driving an automatic on occasion on the ‘wrong’ side of the road has probably taken a little longer! The site is an oasis in the middle of town and perfect not only for discovering more about our famous son, but for environmental education, picnics, events, or simple ’sauntering’.

Last Saturday (21st April) was an important day here, being Birthday/Earth Day. What has now become a traditional celebration of John Muir’s birthday, organised by the local John Muir Association, with many of his own family present, was linked with the wider ‘environmental’ event. 52 stalls, tours, a fun run, music, food, speeches, pipers and over 1650  visitors later, all agreed that the day had been a success. Moreover, the rain held off until the late afternoon!

Summer is now on the way at last and the temperatures are rising with lots of sunshine. As well as working at JMNHS, I have enjoyed one or two ‘familiarisation’ visits to other Park sites in the area. American playwright Eugene O’Neill’s beautiful Tao House by Danville, the Rosie the Riveter site at Richmond, and a day’s visit to Point Reyes National Park have all been highlights.  

Both staff and volunteers here at JMNHS have been so welcoming and patient with a ‘foreigner’ in their midst, not to mention one member of staff allowing me the use of her home while, coincidentally, she is visiting Scotland. Hopefully we will be able to reciprocate the hospitality in the not too distant future.