Month: July 2013

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.