Category: Museums

With the bank holiday it was a four day week in which I mentioned to:

• Planning how we’ll progress our service delivery strategy with the Arts Council Audience segments at the heart – which of the 13 choices would you be?
• Contributed to an expression of interest for the Heritage Lottery Fund
• Reviewed our reporting and evaluation methods with Fay and have a new direction, particularly in light of losing a member of staff to voluntary severance
• Reviewed our existing Marketing and Branding efforts and began to look at how ‘digital’ will begin to affect our plans
• Received my six month personal review  which the Council call a PMDS and got twos and threes (three is two thumbs up)
• Announced that our website phase one soft launch will be Thursday 8th May and the official launch is Thursday 15th May.
• Planned how we’d achieve going live on the 15th by breaking the tasks into weekly sprints
• Showed off our beta website prototype to the central design team and web communications. Tony is a great sounding board for my ideas and time will tell if our logo style navigation is right or wrong!

I’d also now like to plug the Museums Get Mobile Conference that I’m hosting – come along on Friday the 16th May AND/OR come out for a drink on the Thursday evening!

A different type of week with a conference out of town and the service getting caught up in the latest banksy story”

• I spend a few days in Harrogate for the 37th annual UKSG conference. I went to find out where the publishing industry is at the moment, seeing at the museum service is a publisher without even really knowing it. I also had the pleasure of speaking twice about the future of publishing, how it affects the museum and how you can make your own ebook
• We heard that our application to the Nesta RnD digital arts fund was successful to the next round
• I met with our funder, Arts Council to explain what the service got up to in the last quarter. The overarching message for me was to show and tell – ship stuff!
• The new service website has continued to evolve and i’m expecting us to move from alpha to beta in the next few weeks. For now see the mockup and read the GDS service manual details on the beta phase
• The museum agreed to house the latest Banksy ‘Mobile Lovers’ and I had the slightly out of my remit task of carrying the art work into the building from the police van! I did ask if I could wear a police hat but…

This week being able to progress taking online payments continues to be an itch I can’t seemed to scratch.  With that being said I mentioned:

• Met two UWE students to explain how we currently make use of interaction onsite
• Discussed how we will approach the AV requirements for our Moved by Conflict exhibition
• Reviewed our social media guidelines and changed all the passwords!
• Had a great catch up with most of the team to look at our 2014-2015 plans
• Contributed to our 2015-2018 service plan
• Got a request for licensing 214 seconds of video footage – was nice to pop to films at 59 where they work until 2am and turned our recording around super quickly
• Learned how I’ll need to report official stats back to the Council
• Some University of Bristol students showed us their improved prototype for interacting with objects in a case. Very clever use of gestures
• Wrote a one-page business case for dealing with our online revenue (we get money, we pay the council, no?) as there is a large untapped opportunity
• Sat with our education team to look at their needs on the new website

This week was I got up to:

• Explored research collaboration with University of Bath – if anybody has £8,000 kicking around to give us to have a PhD student you know where to find me!
• Ran a 30min introduction to using twitter for Natural Sciences. It’s important we give the keys to our social efforts to the curators and I look forward to what they cook up
• Discovered which path of “accountability” I need to tread to use various online services
• Met with two of our student groups to have a demo of their projects. I was blown away by their progress and both could be used as they are quite nicely
• Sat with our exhibition designer Simon to see what contribution our team needs to make for Moved by Conflict which opens in October.
• Gave an update to the wider management team about the new website and using online tools for managing projects
• Found out i’m very curious about records management
• I’ll be contributing to a HLF digital bid we hope to put in – funny as I co-wrote the digital guidance back in 2012 and now i’m on the other side of the desk
• Reviewed some tenders
• Discussed with two curators about how we can blog and use our tools to build interest for an exhibition next year
• Started to think aloud about our content strategy

Coming out of the haze of two substantial bids this week felt like light work in comparison:

• Finally submitted the Nesta digital r and d bid
• Agreed how we’d use our Nexus 7 tablets for the English Magic exhibition. Finally get to make an ebook!
• Waved goodbye to Mark who has been supporting our moving image digitisation programme
• Shared my ideas with our interim director about online tools for running projects
• Sat with marketing to discuss their input on the new website
• Mark P took me on a tour of the M shed kiosks as we work to switch over from using umbraco to run them to our collection management tool eMU
• Started to use basecamp for an internal project to showcase the benefit for the service. I suspect the Council has plans for project management across the landscape but no doubt it will something different…
• I have taken on a lot of the evaluation and performance role functions so had a positive session with Fay to look at the essentials
• Really enjoyed meeting an English Heritage  contact to find out how they are going to be approaching digital and I’ve offered to lend a hand if they need
• Reviewed some tenders for a local partner. Please note that if you use public money we expect open practices and sharing of the outputs. If you don’t want to play then get off our court
• Shared the first visual designs of the website with a fairly wide group and was excited to see the design language work.

This week was tiring and well over those 37 hours:

• Attended the Council budget training for the second time – the user experience and user interface are so poor that please note ‘user acceptance testing’ is not the same as user testing from the beginning
• Met up with a local business wanting to pitch us selling audio services
• Showed our new website progress to the central comms team and got some helpful tips
• Spent A LOT of time on our Nesta Digital r and d application only for the website to crash on submission day. A HUGE thanks to Gail Boyle for carrying me to the finish line
• Met with fffunction to get a first peek at the website visual design
• Spoke on Thursday evening at museumshowoff
• Discussed what the next steps were for the British empire and commonwealth collection from a digital view

This week I managed to get up to:

• Switched from an intensive and antiquated system for organising our exhibition ‘private views’ to using eventbrite
• Enjoyed an event to officially launch our inclusive audio guide ‘DiscoveryPens‘ which Paul organised
• We submitted our major Arts Council bid which is a huge deal for the future of the service, wish us luck!
• Got the news that several great folk will be taking voluntary severance
• Switched my brain from the ACE bid to the Nesta digital R and D fund for the arts bid
• Started to outline key objectives for 2014-15
• Enjoyed the Pervasive Media studio lunchtime talk about using ibeacons which I hope we can begin to experiment with
• Outlined plans for several talks I’ll be giving soon

Roll on next week.

By the end of this week I could see the light at the end of the tunnel for two of our major project bids. I still managed to get up to some mischief:

• Had a great chat with future cities to see how we may be able to work together. The museum should have a strong role to play, being one of the few free public indoor spaces left…
• Dipped in and out of Arts Council bid stuff
• Met with the University of Bristol and aardman to develop our joint Nesta bid. Great to have folks to bounce ideas off
• Discussed what the folks at the L Shed needed from me to help them – scanning equipment, staying out of their way and putting in some wifi were the main areas of focus
• Chopped it up with David from the Watershed to find out all about their digital work
• Attended bathcamp 44
• Attended a lunchtime talk at the pervasive media studio from Daniel Meadows
• Two post-doc students from the University of Bristol demo’ed a prototype combining motion tracking and a clever way of interacting with objects. I really hope we can test this approach soon
• Fought bravely for a digital budget…

Pretty hardcore work due to the pending major bid deadline BUT still managed to keep these little plates spinning:

• Attended day two of the No Boundaries conference
• Neck deep in final Arts Council bid work…80 percent of my week
• Got permission to purchase replacement IT kit
• Discussed how IT and digital might support the Moved by Conflict exhibition. Particularly the use of sensors for interaction
• Discussed how I could contribute to our third and final year Paul Hamlyn Foundation project
• We conducted a half day user testing session for the new website with real visitors.