Behind the scenes

 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 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’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…