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My first month at the museum

This week marks the end of my first month working as Technical Development Manager across Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives.
The role is positioned around supporting ‘everything digital’ across our 5 locations AND the web.
What makes this exciting is that we need to work with digital for people on-site and online as museums attract tourists from around the globe as well as researchers.
I have spent much of my time meeting people across the service and being nosey about what they do, how they do it and if they have ideas we can develop.
I have been grappling with tools to capture ideas, to-do lists and seeing a map of the activity with Trello starting to look a real winner.
The breadth of work is very diverse but nowt I haven’t come into contact with in previous jobs.
I have a very supportive boss and I manage a small team of 4 who have a wealth of experience to help tackle our plans. The local digital scene really has come on leaps and bounds in the last 5 years and I have been meeting an inspiring range of artists, academics and business folk.
In addition to the normal run of work I managed to speak at the ARLIS conference on self-publishing and attended the excellent UXBristol.

IF you have any thoughts on digital in the museum space do get in touch, i’d love to hear from you.

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ARLIS Conference: Self-publishing in education

Yesterday I was invited to speak at the Arts and Library Society annual conference. I spoke for 40mins about how staff and students have been self-publishing and the need for libraries to add ‘self-publishing’ to their long list of topics requiring support.

I see self-publishing as an opportunity for libraries to really shine in their support for staff in particular. To quote Craig Mod:

The way books are written has changed.
The canvas for books has changed.
The post-published life of a book has changed.

I enjoyed the talk and hope that my hopping around style of delivery still gave a sense of the topic.

I was lucky to also see a few of the other talks and it really opened my eyes to publishing in the arts and museum arena. I think i’ll be hanging around some of the museum curators to see if I can get my hands stuck into a new pet project!

The slides can be found on Google Docs (the PPT is busted) below and if anybody needs me to add some context just get in touch.