Tag: #museumhour

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#MuseumHour 4 Years On

On Monday 8 October we celebrate #MuseumHour‘s 200th edition. It also marks the community’s 4th birthday. Twitter timelines on Monday evenings in the UK and all sorts of other time zones across the world have never been quite the same.

When Sophie Ballinger and I started up #MuseumHour this is what we had in mind. Amazingly, there has been no mission creep. It is still the same, just bigger.

It’s a very simple enterprise, light weight but high energy and without any constrictions of institutionalism or stakeholder expectation. It’s free and for all-comers.

Two years ago we were marking our 100th #MuseumHour. Then, we had two co-organisers, had 46 guest hosts and ~130K impressions per month. Today we have three co-organisers, have had 102 guest hosts (some serial guests) and we get ~ 313.1K impressions per month. A few weeks ago we passed the 10,000 follower milestone.

And we don’t even bother with a blue tick.

We are not funded or supported by any organisation. It’s as independent as you can get. Even if you are not a Twitter-user, you can access all the chat from the website. Unlike Facebook, Twitter is not (yet) a walled garden.

The we is important. My view as a co-organiser is to let the community lead its direction. I have no desire to manage the community or shape the various themes and subjects that get suggested to us. The result is that people seem to really feel like they are part of something, and they are as equally part of it as the next follower.

It’s because of this attitude–shared by co-organisers Katy Jackson and Kate Groome–that the most engaged-with tweet over the last 6 months was about museum toilets.

And that’s all I’m interested in saying about analytics and statistics. The popularity of #MuseumHour and the organic way it has grown has meant it has attracted the attention of more people and organisations wishing to use the platform to gain a new audience. This is great, but we don’t provide analytics or statistics to guest hosts as this is about taking part first, promotion and profile-raising will come automatically if you do that well.

It’s nice to hear that #MuseumHour is now a regularly recommended part of someone’s study or volunteer work, and many pledge to take part as part of their AMA (CPD award organised by the Museums Association).

The one area of change that I am particularly keen on supporting is the growth in interest outside the UK. Over the last year and a bit we have had #MuseumHour hosted in Estonia, Croatia, Sweden and New Zealand (twice). Maybe #MuseumHour could use a different language as well as English some time?

Happy 4th Birthday, #MuseumHour! Here is every person and topic that has made it happen so far.

 

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Old Heritage Archive

#100museumhours

#100museumhours logo

#100museumhours logo

  • 2 years
  • 100 chats on 100 subjects
  • Two Hosts: @tehm and @sospot
  • 46 Guest Hosts
  • 22.1K Tweets (all time)
  • 130-140K Impressions per month
  • 4-5K Impressions per day
  • ~25-100 Engagements per Tweet

It’s a very simple enterprise, light weight but high energy and without any constrictions of institutionalism or stakeholder expectation. It’s free and for all-comers.

Follow: @museumhour
Mondays 20:00 UK time
Hashtag: #museumhour

In October 2014, I wrote about the idea of #museumhour, a (yet another) Twitter movement following the model of weekly, fortnightly and monthly chat forums. Today we celebrate museumhour’s second birthday and our 100th #museumhour.

It was Sophie Ballinger’s tweet from the Eureka! Museum account back in May 2014 that I found a couple of months later (wondering if anyone had started up a regular museum slot on Twitter) that started it all off.

Over the last two years and 100 museumhours things have evolved but not a huge amount. I thought it would be useful to outline museumhour’s current philosophy and how it works. It’s a very simple enterprise, light weight but high energy and without any constrictions of institutionalism or stakeholder expectation. It’s free and for all-comers.

Our philosophy

To provide a regular, open forum for the discussion of museum issues. It is for anyone with an interest in museums, not just museum workers. You don’t have to participate to benefit from it.

Free from influence. Museumhour is run entirely on a voluntary basis, week in week out with occasional breaks. We don’t receive any funding or in-kind support beyond our own resources.

Platform for communication, not broadcast. There are very few rules that govern museumhour. All we ask is that the topics that are suggested to us are broad enough to encourage as wide an audience as possible. However we also welcome specialist topics that don’t often get public airplay.

We will not accept themes that are solely for the promotion of one initiative, project or organisation. It’s fine for your thing to be used as an anchor for debate but prompts, cues and links must range broadly. The best museumhours are those where the host engages with a range of the responses tweeted in return – it’s not always easy though when it gets very frenetic!

It’s also ok to use the #museumhour hashtag to help promote and plug your events and activities but when you’re hosting you must be mindful not to broadcast but to exchange and communicate.

Why Twitter?

Twitter is a relentless quick-fire ‘of the moment’ forum for rapid exchange. That’s why we chose it – or rather it chose us.

Managed well, Twitter also promotes the sense of an open and diverse community that we need for museumhour to work and provides a healthy and productive environment for people to share their views and information without fear of thinking they or what they have to say isn’t important enough or might be subject to sneers, reprisal or other puerile behaviour.

The other benefit of Twitter, over, say, Facebook, is that it is open for everyone to see, not just those who have an account and are logged in. This way anyone with access to the internet can head on over to twitter.com/museumhour and see the discussions, or, follow using the saved hashtag #museumhour.

Museumhour only exists on Twitter and that’s where it is staying. We do not maintain separate channels such as website, enewsletter or other social networks. We or our Guest Hosts will occasionally Storify museumhour debates or include content in their own Storify account or other work which is great.

Featured

Museumhour benefits from occasional blogging by us and others. We’ve been really pleased to be featured by the Ministry of Curiosity, Fran Taylor, and others, as well as featuring in museum articles such as Museum Practice.

Our 46 Guest Hosts have also done a brilliant job using their websites, blogs and social media channels to promote the subjects of their museumhours.

We do want to take part in the big debates and issues facing museums and have played a role in helping other organisations with hosting sessions whose results have fed into research, for example, AIM’s work on museum charging, and the MA’s work on workforce professional development.

Is this a good format for museumhour for the foreseeable future? And can you suggest changes to refresh the experience? Do you want to join our team?

What next?

Our format is simple. After the first couple of weeks of museumhour we realised that the big wide open world of topics made it difficult for people to engage meaningfully with each other so we started to introduce themes.

We or our Guest Host comes up with a range of prompts, cues and links to information prior to (usually) and most importantly during the hour – approximately one every 5-10 minutes. Some of these are in the form of questions, others are statements that are responded to.

Museumhour happens and then it ends. We move on to organising the next week.

Is this a good format for museumhour for the foreseeable future? And can you suggest changes to refresh the experience? Do you want to join our team?

Two years of relentless weekly organisation is bound to take a toll on the schedules and lives of its two founders. Two people who haven’t even met each other in the flesh but who have somehow made this thing work.

Tribute

I would like to pay tribute to my co-founder Sophie Ballinger for being a brilliant colleague and friend making the museumhour enterprise both fulfilling and fun! We seem to fill each other’s gaps naturally and with minimum fuss. That can be quite a rare quality in a team.

But museumhour isn’t all about us. We have prided ourselves on taking a back seat and gently herding from behind. We think it is about time our team expanded. We are therefore shortly going to be advertising for new members of our small team. If you have read this and feel excited about museumhour please stay in touch.

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Old Heritage Archive

What are rural museums anyway?

Cornwall is categorised as a rural region.
Cornwall is categorised as a rural region.

On 13 June #museumhour debated rural museums, or museums in rural regions. It didn’t take long for the farm jokes to start. The debate was guest-hosted by Cornwall Museums Partnership and Highland Museums Partnership and mainly involved questions about the challenges of working in museums in rural places and the benefits they provide to their communities.

We were also reminded that rural museums also exist in cities (lots of contributions from Museum of English Rural Life in Reading), bringing the whole urban v rural debate a new dimension.

It still bothers me as to what different people mean when they talk about rural museums and what kinds of preconceptions exist about them amongst policy makers, pundits and practitioners when they discuss rurality.

Cornwall is categorised as a rural region and certainly there aren’t the big cities that exist elsewhere and its undeveloped transport system means it definitely feels like it is rural and remote here but there are still a surprising number of towns here with their own urban communities and heritage–some of which are served by their civic museums.

I’d like to explore this more, especially in the context of what civic museums are.

You can read some of the debate on Storify but, as ever, a number of side discussions and points were made that are worthwhile recording too so the ideas can be shared and debated further. It was particularly good to get contributions from Australia and the USA.

Here is a list of thoughts made by me and a couple of others in the debate:

  1. Working in a rural context seems to be 10x harder.
  2. There’s growing discussion of ‪civic museums amongst policy makers but rarely defined. What about civicness in ‪rural regions?
  3. There are hundreds of towns and urban centres in ‪rural regions. Countryside and rurality are relative.
  4. In US, many, many museums are ‪rural museums, in location, coll, or both. Represent important record of life in those areas (Tracey Berg-Fulton, USA).
  5. Largest no. of Accredited museums in UK run by ‪@nationaltrust in mainly ‪rural areas? ‪
  6. I think voices from museums in ‪#rural regions esp in big debates such as ‪diversity tend to be forgotten.
  7. Many cope on budgets that would be laughed at elsewhere, doing great stuff ‪(Mary O Toole).
  8. They are, alas, often the most vulnerable (funding, staffing, facilities). The loss of rural museums =devastating loss of memory ‪(Tracey Berg-Fulton, USA).
  9. Does quality more than quantity of engagement matter more for ‘small’ museums in ‪rural places? ‪
  10. It’s so important to challenge the assumptions inherent in categorisation. ‪
  11. What does everyone think about the idea that museums need to reflect national ‪diversity in some cases rather than regional? From report on ‪diversity in museum workforce esp in specialist roles.
  12. Huge retired population here [Cornwall] so no shortage of people with skills and interest. 37% of pop volunteer (not just museums).
  13. Retired population certainly helps, volunteers who join enjoy it immensely as its counteracts rural isolation (Helston Museum).
  14. Some bonza Aussie rural museums: QANTAS Founders Museum @qfom, Stockmans Hall of Fame @ASHOFAustralia, Carnamah Museum @carnamah (Heritage People, Hobart).
  15. Also problem of categorisation – such as what to do with industrial structures in rural areas (Dr. James Lattin).
  16. Ought to bring ‪coastal perspectives into a future ‪#museumhour debate on regional differences.
  17. Being connected online is a massive antidote to isolation often encountered working in ‪rural regions.

Please join in! Leave a comment and remember you can join #museumhour any time by following the hashtag.

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Old Heritage Archive

Debate: Should museums charge for entry? #museumhour

Update:

This debate has now happened. You can explore it on Storify.

Essential info:

On 11 April at 20:00 BST (UK time) Museum Hour is debating the thorny and loaded question of entry charges for museums.

We are helping the Association of Independent Museums (AIM) with their crucial research on this issue which is primarily being conducted through a sector-wide survey: The Impact of Charging Museum Admission. The deadline for taking part is 11 April as well but AIM may extend this by a couple of days following the #museumhour debate.

The research is being undertaken by DC Research and also in partnership with Arts Council England and also supported by the Welsh Assembly Government.

Museum Hour will Storify the debate shortly afterwards and the interactions will feed into the broader research into the question of museum admission charges.

Go straight to the museum charging survey.

There is a lot of misinformation about museums and entry charges, and a lot of misunderstanding within the sector and its audiences. Free museum entry to UK Nationals is pretty much the only manifesto pledge you will see on most political parties’ agendas that have much to do with museums in society. Is there a sense that the expectation of free entry confuses some museum visitors who hesitate when confronted with an admission fee–not helped by national radio DJs proclaiming that “we have to keep our museums free.” Lines could also be blurred with the socially-defining issue of library closure.

Echoing the social worth and function of their museums many Local Authority museums have supported free entry as a way to embed their role in their communities but in the Age of Austerity several museums face pressure to introduce entry charges to improve their income streams against a backdrop of falling and failing grants–that’s if they aren’t facing total closure.

Of course there is the huge (majority) independent museum sector for whom income from admission fees is a strategically crucial part of their sustainability and have happily charged for years without being at odds with their moral and social contract with society. Some have also gone free having seen that entry charging was limiting their work and also their resilience.

The national press has picked up on this issue, including the Financial Times. Sector commentators have put their views forward on this topic. The Museums Association has come out strongly in favour of defending free entry to civic museums. Civic museums are not well-defined in their context (except as Local Authority museums which used to be free) — another facet to this debate that needs better engagement.

On the other hand those running successful independent museums who are fully engaged in their commercial and market viability present a slightly different view. This Apollo Feature on museum charging contains both views.

This is a very complex and confusing picture which will not result in one answer that all museums can apply. But to have the starting point of good, solid research can only be a good thing to help the museum sector understand how it is they are seen by society and what society expects from us.

It is incredible to think that proper research on this fundamental issue for museums has not already happened. As the UK Government in its recent Culture White Paper announced it is going to review museums (which ones, how and why as yet undetermined) I cannot think of a more crucial issue for Whitehall and politicians to engage with than how museums are perceived by their communities, and the visitors to those communities, and surely the question of who pays and at what point is basic to this understanding?

Here is a taster of some of the questions and provocations that we are chairing on the night. We will be inviting new and different questions from the floor too:

  • Are we asking the right question? Free entry museums need money from somewhere so should museum funding change?
  • If people expect to pay for tickets to the cinema, theatre and football, why not museums and galleries?
  • Is museum charging a practical funding problem or an ethical and moral issue? And whose problem is it?
  • Free at the point of use? Do museums’ ethical responsibilities towards its communities mean #museumcharge becomes a barrier?
  • Do you charge entry for everyone? Which categories of visitor go free?
  • As a museum and gallery visitor, are you more likely to visit a free museum than one that charges?
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Old Heritage Archive

#migration and #museums

A migration story at the NZ Maritime Museum in Auckland.
A migration story at the NZ Maritime Museum in Auckland.

A migration story at the NZ Maritime Museum in Auckland.
A migration story at the NZ Maritime Museum in Auckland.

How do museums represent, present and interpret migrant stories? Museumhour from 25 January 2016.

I was inspired to host this topic following my visit to museums in New Zealand in Auckland (National Maritime Museum of New Zealand) and Wellington (Wellington Museum and Te Papa National Museum). All these museums featured the stories of migrants heavily. In fact the whole human history of the islands is one of migration from the first Maori voyages to the latest migrations from other parts of the Pacific and the Far East. It was good to see them presented so honestly.

I found myself enchanted and enthralled by the stories because you can’t get more human a story than that of deciding to move away from home.

We captured our great debate on #migration and #museums on museumhour’s Storify:

https://storify.com/museumhour/migration-and-museums

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Museums and the UK General Election 2015

 

Culture and museums find themselves off the menu this election.

This is a summary of excerpts from the policies and manifestos of political parties standing candidates in the UK General Election on 7 May 2015.

Monday 4 May at 20:00 in the UK will see a #GE2015 election special #museumhour so please do come and join the debate if you are on Twitter.

I was looking for mention of specific policies and commitments towards museums, and in lieu of that, their views on culture.

This is not an exhaustive list of all parties standing in the upcoming election and I would welcome news from other parties and especially independent Prospective Parliamentary Candidates if they are standing on a culture or museum platform, to leave their pledges in the comments below.

Business as usual for museums after the election?

What is clear is that culture and museums find themselves off the menu this election. Museums are not a political hot potato or even on the radar of politicians, and particularly pundits who control what we hear from the media about this election.

This is in spite of the last 5 years seeing a significant transformation in the governance and landscape of the museum sector in the UK, especially England, namely cuts to grant-in-aid and revenue funding for those museums who were used to receiving it.

Coupled with the huge inequality between museum funding in London compared with the rest of the UK, both remain moot political points, except for the Green Party which makes a specific pledge to reverse this situation (see below).

Purdah (the pre-election period) has prevented the participation of government and local government civil servants engaged in administering, advising and funding museums from commenting or passing opinion on this election.

It is these arms-length or quango organisations that administer public funding to museums that are most likely to be affected by the election result, namely Arts Council England, Historic England, Historic Scotland, Scottish Arts Council, Museums Galleries Scotland, CyMAL, Cadw and RCAHMW in Wales and the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure in Northern Ireland.

UKIP pledges to abolish the Department of Culture, Media and Sport which governs public museum bodies in England, suggesting the role of DCMS would be absorbed into other departments (not stated, see below).

For alternative analyses see the Art Newspaper and the Heritage Alliance. Museums Journal also published an analysis of the BBC Culture Debate on 7 April in May’s edition (article access only to Museums Association members).

Free entry for Nationals (again)

Several parties affirm the commitment to free entry to National museums but little else. The Conservatives alluded to an extra-manifesto commitment towards the creation of an India Gallery in Manchester Museum (in partnership with the British Museum).

Northern Ireland and Wales talk museums more

The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) makes specific reference to the Ulster Museum and its role in promoting the Northern Ireland brand in its manifesto and one Sinn Féin candidate has made a public commitment towards the Derry Walls.

Twitter conversation of politicians using Derry Walls in #GE2015

Plaid Cymru make a tantalising pledge to create specific apprenticeships in the fields of historical documentation and culture in order to preserve specialist skills and knowledge. Indeed the party makes nine separate pledges towards the arts, culture and heritage of Wales–the most of any of the party policies I have read so far.

So what are the other parties saying about museums? Listed in alphabetical order.

What parties say about museums

Conservative party

From their manifesto 2015, they pledge to voters in the section Enabling you to enjoy our heritage, creativity and sports, to:

  • Keep major national museums and galleries free to enter.

Democratic Unionist Party

From their manifesto 2015:

“Whether at Westminster, Stormont or Europe, the DUP is pro-active in developing Northern Ireland’s cultural wealth and encouraging creativity to develop new opportunities in our economy.”

  • Display appropriately our cultural assets at the Ulster Museum to promote the Northern Ireland brand
  • Reduce the number of arms-length bodies associated with DCAL (Dept of Culture, Arts and Leisure)

Green Party

From the Culture principles stated on their website:

“CMS414 The body of historical creative work forms the basis of our culture at national, regional and local level; the preservation of this culture is a responsibility of the state through support for cultural stores such as museums, archives, libraries, heritage and major performing arts venues and companies.”

From the Media, Sports and Arts section in their manifesto 2015:

  • Increase government arts funding by £500 million a year to restore the cuts made since 2010 and reinstate proper levels of funding for local authorities, helping to keep local museums, theatres, libraries and art galleries open.

Labour Party

From the section on the Arts and Culture section in their manifesto 2015:

  • We reaffirm our commitment to universal free admission to ensure that our great works of art and national heritage can be enjoyed in all parts of the country.

Liberal Democrat Party

From the Pride in Creativity section of their manifesto 2015:

  • Maintain free access to museums and galleries, while giving these institutions greater autonomy.

Mebyon Kernow – The Party for Cornwall

No specific mention of museums. From the Recognition for Cornwall section of their manifesto 2015:

  • Greater local control over all aspects of Cornwall’s heritage, culture and identity, including the transfer of responsibility for work currently undertaken in Cornwall by agencies such as English Heritage.

Quizzing one of the candidates on Twitter I asked if that would include include Arts Council England and the reply was affirmative, that all organisations dealing with Cornwall should be devolved:

Tweets between me and Mebyon Kernow screenshot

Plaid Cymru – The Party of Wales

From the principles stated on their website Plaid Cymru says:

“Wales has a huge amount of priceless national treasures, including our National Museum, the National Library, and countless CADW monuments, and we believe that every child ought to have the opportunity, free of charge, to visit one of the National Museums or Libraries during their school years.”

In the Arts, Heritage and Culture section of the manifesto 2015:

  • We will ensure that free access to National Museum Wales continues.
  • We will create apprenticeships in the field of historical documentation and culture so that staff skills, knowledge and experiences are retained and nurtured.

Scottish National Party

From policy outlined on their website the SNP makes a commitment towards museum loans:

“We will continue to support the International Touring Fund for Scotland’s National Companies and co-ordinate overseas cultural and economic promotion activities. That means bringing together, where we can, national company tours, museum and gallery loans and trade missions for an ‘all Scotland’ approach to cultural and economic promotion.”

There is no mention of museums, heritage, arts or culture in the SNP’s manifesto 2015.

Sinn Féin

I could not find any mention of museums, heritage, arts or culture on Sinn Féin’s website nor the policies published on their website. The only glimpse into the party’s view of museums is the brief event stated above of a Prospective Parliamentary Candidate in the Foyle constituency using the Derry Walls (see above).

I tweeted the official party account for link but have yet to receive a reply.

United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP)

There is no mention of museums in the published policies of UKIP. From the Heritage and Tourism section of their manifesto 2015 they pledge to:

  • Abolish the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

Want to have a say?

Join #museumhour to take part in a special #GE2015 debate on Monday 4 May 20:00 in the UK. Some of the questions we are asking:

  • Why aren’t museums politically important?
  • Should all museums be politically neutral?
  • Has your museum petitioned local candidates?
  • Have your local candidates visited your museum and its staff and volunteers?
  • Which party will offer the best deal for UK museums?
  • Should politicians be more interested in museums or is it better to be left alone?
  • Has your museum got involved in campaigning to encourage people to vote?
  • What, if anything, will change after the election for your museum?
  • What, if anything, will happen to national museum funding and advisory bodies after the election?
  • What message would you like to send out to your local candidates before election day?
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Old Heritage Archive

#museumhour

#museumhour tweets

#Follow @museumhour
Mondays 7-8pm UST (UK time).

#museumhour tweets

#museumhour is (yet another) new UK-based museum movement which took 24 hours to set up by Sophie Ballinger (@sospot) and me (@tehm).

Sophie had a while back posed the question of whether a #museumhour existed in Twitterverse and received the sound of tumbleweed in return.

I was travelling back to Cornwall from London after a meeting of Museums Association Regional Reps in which there was much discussion about the best forums for museum people to get together online to exchange news and views, particularly to debate the Museum Association’s new agenda Museums Change Lives (I almost wrote Loves).

Place-based Twitter hours have been well-established across the country, from #CornwallHour to #ScotlandHour as have profession-based ones such as #legalhour.

Searching for the existence of a #museumhour Tehmina found Sophie via Eureka! Museum’s twitter feed and after a few tweets exchanged after working hours during commutes and baby feeds we claimed the hour every Monday 7-8pm. Sophie set up a Twitter account @museumhour to help field the exchange of tweets and an automatic retweet of its accompanying hashtag #museumhour

As long as people used the hashtag #museumhour or replied to @museumhour participants can follow tweets easily.

After some initial campaigning in between our day jobs Monday 6 October, 7pm arrived. We had about 57 followers at the beginning and by the end of the evening this grew to over 100.

We had no idea what would happen. We didn’t want to control proceedings by forcing a topic but to encourage people to share #onecoolthing about their museum or their favourite museum.

Although a UK-based social meet we had willing tweeters from Virginia, USA to South Australia. And those working in museums were joined with museophiles.

Astonishingly 99 people sent 349 tweets during the first #museumhour

Tweets ranged from Brighton Museums’ football table in their World Stories gallery, Kids in Museums’ Youth Panel meeting at Geffrye Museum, the launch of iBeacons at Roman Caerleon, the famous cat mummy of Derby Museums (it is essential to include cats in all Twitter conversations–Ed), Lowewood Museum’s community project and exhibition on World War 1 display, finding out Sir Walter Scott used to be a Sheriff and his courtroom museum is there to be visited in Selkirk, a museum geek’s Elk, two major development projects at Surgeons Hall Museum and Epping Forest District Museum, and news from the Welsh Museum Festival. And more.

In fact it continued beyond the hour.

Look, just take a look at #museumhour tweets.

The idea is to let #museumhour grow organically and steadily and begin to introduce some hard hitting topics to the weekly discussions.

Policy-making museum people were notably absent or quiet and yet tend to be the ones always wanting our opinion on things. We hope they join the talk.

I also hope that #museumhour will remain good fun, be a new, additional way, for museum people to meet each other and network, as well as providing a forum for opinions to be exchanged.

Follow @museumhour now.