Behind the scenes

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…

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 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.

Documenting the collections - what is that exactly? At its simplest it just means recording all the information we have about each object we have in the museums collection. It is this information - from the name and type of the object, its size and the material it’s made from to the stories, the people and the places associated with it - which is essential in undertanding the object; in relating the stories we can tell with it; and in making the connections between our own objects, things elsewhere and the lives and interests of our visitors (both physical and online). Without the documentation the objects are mute - they do not speak for themselves (except to those experts who already carry some of this information around in their heads anyway). So I’m pleased that we have been awarded a grant from the Scottish Museums Council to support the establishment of a Collections Officer post to work on the documentation and conservation of our collections.

But (there’s always a ‘but’) what sort of information is this? It often tends to be technical, and to use obscure professional terms whose meaning would not be obvious to the non-expert. Since we are planning to put our collections information online (and to connect information about collections with the Site and Monuments Record and the records of the East Lothian Archives) the question is: will visitor be able to find stuff that they are looking for, that is in our collections, if they don’t know the terms we have used to describe them? Probably not, unless by complete chance. If that’s the case, what can we do about it?

Yesterday I went to a really interesting presentation yesterday on tagging as a means of facilitating resource discovery (or, in English, helping searchers find stuff). Tagging means adding individual words or short phrases that describe, or relate to the record being tagged. For example, you might tag a photograph of a fishing boat with the tags ‘boat’, ‘photograph’ and ‘fishing’. But you might also use other terms (perhaps the boat’s name, or names of crew or owners, or other terms relating to fishing). In the end you have a list of words and phrases that relate to the photograph. The fun bit for visitors searching for stuff on your site comes when they can search on one of these tags (maybe by clicking on it in a list on screen) and bring up all the other items tagged with the same word or phrase. Searching (and finding) becomes simpler - once you’ve found one item, you can easily find more items of the same sort, or related to the thing you’ve found.

But the really fun thing is when you allow visitors to the site to add their own tags to collection items that they find while searching. This helps future visitors find what they are looking for more easily. It got me thinking about how we might do this for our own collections, both adding in our own tags and allowing visitors to contribute - helping searchers, and helping us to understand how our visitors categorise and think about our collections. It turns the documentation of the collections from an internal professional process into a wide scale ongoing collaborative process. The ‘our’ in ‘our collections’ is no longer just us curators, but expands to potentially include all of us.

So if anyone reading this ends up applying for our Collections Officer post, you now know why you’ve got a little extra job to do…

I’ve just attended a workshop on museums and blogging by the three guys from the Walker Art Cente - a follow on from a similar session last year. It was amazing to see how the traffic generated by the Walker blogs has boomed since then, and a confirmation that producing content of this sort is a worthwhile because there is an audience out there for it. Once again there were useful tips, although as ever there were things we’ve already done or are in the planning stage (though with Bebo.com in our case, as that is what teenagers in East Lothian predominantly favour at the moment). Even this is heartening as it is in a sense getting some external validation of how we are planning (and encouraging others) to proceed.

Now I’m off to ponder the idea of Facebook, Bebo et al. as virtual street corners - as teenagers increasingly tend to get moved on by the police from the physical street corners which have been their territory since time immemorial.

I think I’ve finally stopped fiddling with my presentation for Museums and the Web 2007. Of course, one of the disadvantages of computers for the perfectionist-inclined obsessive re-writer is the ease with which you can endlessly tinker with your text / presentation / layout. In the end you are making changes that probably no-one else would ever notice, that in all likelihood make no difference to the impact (or lack thereof) of your end product. It’s also a danger that by focusing on the detail you can lose sight of the overall shape of your paper or presentation. Those of us old enough (as I am, alas) to remember the years B.C. (Before Computers) will recall those heady days of paste and typewriters, where making changes was such a pain you quickly reached the stage of “Dammit, it’s good enough.”

Anyway, it is done. Fingers crossed. I just need to pack my suitcase, decide which books I’m going to take, and make sure I’ve printed up all the paperwork I need.

Actually, it turns out I haven’t stopped fiddling - I’ve just thought of a small change I’d like to make…

Apparently the show referenced below is entitled 1707-In The Footsteps of Defoe, and the first episode, focussing on Prestonpans and points East, will be broadcast on Monday 2nd April at 3.45pm on BBC Radio 4.  See here for more info.

Radio 4 is available to listen to online.

A couple of weeks ago I waited in a freezing cold Prestongrange Museum (it’s been closed for the season since October), waiting for a reporter and a producer from BBC Radio 4.  They were in the area making a documentary about Daniel Defoe and his role in the events surrounding the Act Of Union between Scotland and England, 300 years ago.  Quite what part the town of Prestonpans played in all this is unfamiliar to me, but the radio people were keen to get a flavour of the area and the relationship between its present-day cultural activities and its illustrious past.

It was an interesting insight into the BBC’s working methods.  Despite the fact that the interview was to be recorded and edited for later broadcast, I was far from relaxed.  Instead, it felt rather like a job interview, and I was very self-conscious, trying to seem slightly more authoritative than I am.  The thing was, they were asking questions about the museum’s role and its relationship to the past.  These are interesting topics, and I’m sure I could explain them at length in an extended conversation.  However, they’re also subjects that rarely cross the mind when  faced with the day-to-day realities of my job, i.e. creating worksheets, going on classroom visits, going cap-in-hand for funding, devising activities etc.  We rarely have the luxury of stepping back and assessing our place in the local community or justifying it.  These things certainly aren’t at the front of my mind, ready to encapsulate in a ten-second soundbite. At times I was aware that I was waffling, rather as you do when faced with a difficult question at an exam viva, for example.  I could have asked for a minute to compose my thoughts (we weren’t live after all), but having a big furry microphone placed near your face does tend to lend an artificial urgency to proceedings. 

So I have renewed sympathy for politicians of all stripes who appear on programmes like Today and Newsnight, and (usually) manage to sound half-way coherent when faced with a barrage of probing questions.  My interviewer was not at all Paxman-like, but still I managed to fluff my lines on more than one occasion.  I did, I think, manage to make some points about the museum’s relationships with other local amenities and attractions, and how we hope to build on these to establish a new industry in Prestonpans (i.e. leisure and cultural tourism) to replace the old ones (i.e.  mining, pottery etc.).  The programme goes out in the first week of April, apparently, so we’ll se whether they’ve managed to edit me to make me seem fluent, or whether my thoughts will end up on the cutting-room floor.