Monday

Spend the day at King’s Meadow Primary School in Haddington where I delivered 3 sessions to their P6 classes on the Victorians. We did a Victorian washday, using tin bath and washboard, which was very fun but also very wet! Came back to the office afterwards and went through emails.

Tuesday

Met artist Tom Ewing at Prestongrange to discuss his artwork for the new ’shopping’ interactive at Prestongrange. Children will be able to visit a Victorian Prestonpans High Street and explore things like an ear syringe and a meat grinder! I stopped by Musselburgh Burgh and picked up the Old Toys Loan Box the P1 classes had borrowed. Teacher said it had been very useful and they would request it again next year. Then I rushed over to Dunbar for a meeting with all the museums team.

Wednesday

After a flexi morning off, I spent the afternoon going through applications for our Seasonal Museum Assistant posts - we mark them all along the essential and desirable personal specifications. It’s hard! Treated myself to a wheat-free chocolate biscuit and toffee shortbread biscuit half way through! One of our lovely volunteers, Hazel, had brought in the shortbread for Katherine and I due to our wheat allergies.

Thursday

Attended Excel training with the Council - have lots of ideas about how to improve the various databases I manage now! I keep one on all the events I’ve organised including visitor figures, cost, time, date, etc and now I’ll be able to do lots of calculations and very clever things.

 Friday

Meetings for today were cancelled, so have all day to get organised for the weekend. For our Storytelling event on Saturday for LGBT History Month, I need to buy some tacky Valentine’s decorations and print off posters to direct people around the Brunton. For Sunday, I need to remember to take our various cameras with us and to finalise the guidelines for participants- it’s our photography day for Wikipedia at Prestongrange and John Muir’s Birthplace.

Saturday and Sunday

Events, events, events…

What’s happened to you this week? Hope you’ve had an eventful week too!

So onto the meat of the offering, some predictions for the future…stare with me into my virtual crystal ball and see what 2010 is going to hold for East Lothian Museums. One thing is certain, we will be very busy and there is unlikely to be a dull moment. We are lucky - culture and heritage are live issues in East Lothian and there are lots of people taking an active positive interest in what we do and can do (from commenting on this blog, to volunteering with us). No sitting around in dusty stores for us!

We are working hard on the museum interpretation plans for the John Gray Centre in Haddington. In fact at time of writing the contract for the building work is about to be awarded! Tender documents are close to being finalised for the redevelopment of the interior of Dunbar Town House. The tender has been issued for the interpretation contract for Musselburgh Museum, and we are very much looking forward to seeing what ideas come back. Aside from big developments like these the Service will continue to work to provide a stimulating, fun, informative and accessible experience for as many visitors as possible at all of our venues - I don’t want Prestongrange Museum or John Muir’s Birthplace forgotten. Bookmark our websites and visit soon to see events and exhibitions programmes. Become a friend of ours on Facebook or visit us on Flickr, check us out on YouTube. We are everywhere (sort of like Big Brother, be far far less scary and intimidating)!

So, until next time…

 What’s it all about, I hear you cry! Get out of those wellies, knock the snow out of your ears and I’ll tell you more…

Wikipedia are holding a photography competition called ‘Britain Loves Wikipedia’. The focus of it is that people will be encouraged (through prizes) to take photographs of their local museums and their collections and post them onto Wikipedia, hence generating much more interest and information surrounding museums in general. So we decided to run an event to coincide with this.

It’s called ‘East Lothian Photographers LOVE Wikipedia’ and its on Sunday 14th February at Prestongrange Museum and John Muir’s Birthplace.  We’re also offering free tea/coffee/tours at both venues from 1-4pm! It sounds like it could be really successful and a good, fun event to get new people into and using our venues. I just hope we get enough people who are interested…Please do help us by passing the details onto anyone you know who might be interested. Can you beat our rather stunning photography attempts? (This was taken by the passenger, I promise)

More details on our event: www.eastlothianmuseums.org/content/pages/events-and-activ…

And on the wikipedia competition which you might be interested in anyway:
uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Initiatives/Britain_Loves_Wikipedia

 And lastly, what did I last use Wikipedia to look up? The Glasgow Police Museum which I visited over the holidays. A very friendly reception so do pop in if you’re passing.

Talking in the office today, all museums staff have done various different things over the past 10 years from French Degrees to working in the Secret Bunker. And here we are, ending up with mainly female team heading into a new decade which will see the opening of 2 new museums - Musselburgh and the John Gray Centre. Plus the refurbishment of Dunbar Town House and various ongoing improvements at Prestongrange and John Muir’s Birthplace. There’s enough to keep us busy for the first few years anyway…

The BBC have compiled a list of the 20 most important objects of the last decade as well as a very clever illustration. These include a ‘Bag for Life’, iPod, Credit Card, Hoody and hair straightners. What would be your object of the last 10 years? Personally, mine would be my laptop.

Finally, on behalf of the Museums Service, I’d like to wish all our blog readers a merry Christmas and a happy new decade. Thanks for reading and for commenting throughout the year.  We hope to welcome you back to our sites next year - either web or museums!

Volunteering here is an ever-varied enterprise. There are seven other volunteers here. We don’t often get to meet each other since we usually come in on different days, though today two of my comrades are here cataloguing archaeological artefacts in the Store. I am helping tidy the workroom, where new objects are kept in preparation for accessioning and storage, as well as sorting out some documents. We all have different areas of interest or expertise that we can add to our work – I usually accession objects relating to Dunbar, where I live, though when working with other objects I can sometimes bring some other obscure knowledge to the fore, for example about politics in the case of objects relating to curling.

I just went into the Museum Store, a climate controlled space where the vast majority of the collection – numbering around twelve thousand objects, at last count – is kept. I never fail to be distracted and drawn to some object far away from what I am looking for. In the Store I may be putting objects away, preparing others for display in exhibitions or taking photographs of objects as part of an audit. When I first visited, as a school student on work experience a few years ago, the stuffed seagulls and rodents and the small paddleboat from the old outdoor swimming pool in Dunbar particularly intrigued me. Now, older and slightly more refined, I get waylaid looking at paintings. I like landscape art and we have a few examples, including one I saw a moment ago on a beach looking out to sea with a few tiers of waves crashing to the shore. Having just checked the database entry, it is by Patrick W. Adam and depicting the low tide at Gullane.

Volunteering here is never dull and always throws up some new challenge, just to keep things exciting. It’s been nice to share some of that today. Bye for now.

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!

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!

Multi-Cultural Day included a variety of performances, people and events. The highlight for many were the wonderful Indian Dancers dressed in fabulous costumes - in particular they had a performance using a mixture of Indian and Celtic music which was very clever. Tawona and Ernest, originally from Zimbabwae, performed a variety of poems, stories and music using their hand-crafted instruments. They represented the Seeds of Thought Urban Poetry Group. The noise of the instruments is difficult to describe but it sounded a bit like the chiming of a nursery rhyme in a wind-up toy, but alot faster and more musical. The Grants Braes Burns Club provided a traditional Scottish element to the day, performing some of Burns’ works along the themes of identity and told the well-known story that Burns almost went to the West Indies to become part of the Slave Trade. Coreen Scott was accompanied by Hamish on the Pipes and Scott on the guitar and produced a wonderful sound. We also had local Belly Dancers who performed an Egyptian stick dance. Their movements were amazing! The highlight of the day onstage for children was a French Puppet Show by Tania, who told the story of Lapin, who was very concerned with where his maracas were!

As well as all this we also had stalls by groups such as ELREC and the Dunbar Arts Hub, while local artist Ettie Spencer held a drop-in art workshop for all ages. Sheila Asante offered an object handling session within the Slave Trade exhibition, allowing people to get a close up view of objects such as cotton and tobacco. All in all, a wonderful day, which attracted people from many different cultures, including French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, English, Scottish, Zimbabwean, Ghanian, Brazilian, Indian, and many more. Some of the photographs are on our Flickr site. So many people said to us during the event that they were so glad we were doing an event like this in East Lothian. Draw your own conclusions from that!

But where would all these people who came and celebrated East Lothian’s diversity fit into Nick Griffin’s Britain? Yes, they probably wouldn’t and that’s why we need to continue celebrating the true diversity of our local area. Plans for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History Month in February 2010 are already underway, as are details of how we’re going to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day in January. So, where am I going with this blog? Well, your challenge is to come along and join us at some of these events, or to go and find out something about another culture this weekend, or watch Question Time and then share your views. It’s up to us…

 We also went on a march on Saturday 10th October to commemorate the Suffragettes who campaigned for “Votes for Women!”. We had our own East Lothian banner, created by attendees at a Suffragette Coffee Morning back in September. A group of pupils from Preston Lodge High joined our group and managed to get themselves interviewed and in lots of photos throughout the walk! It ended on Calton Hill where speeches and singing took place. Sheila and I also walked to the very edge of the hill to get a few photos. It was a tad windy as you may be able to see from the photos!

 And as for the bellydancing reference in the title? Multi-Cultural Day at Prestongrange of course. We’ve got a variety of cultures represented including a French Puppet Show, Polish tour of the museum, an Indian Dancer, Zimbabwean Poets and the local Sangstream Choir and Grants Braes Burns Club. There will be a huge marquee outside the Visitor Centre and I’ll be heading there on Saturday to get it all set up and ready to go for first thing on Sunday. We have no idea what our visitor numbers will be for the day…hopefully the 144 chairs will be an alright guestimate!

If you’ve attended an event as part of Black History Month this year, do let us know what you thought!