Museums Showoff's 50th gig, 26th April 2022
Sorry, all the slots for this show have been taken. We hope you’ll sign up for the next show.
Signed up so far:
-
Steven Franklin
ArchiveTok: Winding Back the Clock with TikTok TikTok. The Home of Gen Z; ring lights; trending dances; and now The National Archives! Yes, that’s right the Official Archive of the Government – keepers of almost 1000 years of history have now become fulltime TikTokers. The sensible question to ask at this point is: why? But we don’t do sensible anymore. We’re disruptive, entrepreneurial, pioneering, and inclusive, reaching new and younger audiences along the way. That’s all you need to know. So if you’d like to get a sense of how we’ve achieved this remarkable transformation and the rationale behind it, then this is the talk for you. We do have to warn you, though. The gloves are, as ever, off! The ring light never far away! ArchiveTok is here to stay!
-
Hannah Whyte
Museums, at their heart, are about documentation. Archiving ideas, objects, images and memories. Working at the Cartoon Museum, you become accustomed to this line of thinking on a personal level - that same urge to document is present in zines, comics, diaries and political cartoons. I’d like to talk about the feeling behind fanzines and comics in relation to museums, which are bastions of that feeling on an industrial scale. How do we document things? Why do we document things? Why are some methods of documentation perceived as big and haughty whilst others are seen as forgettable, unimportant or ephemeral? This is something I’m extremely interested in and which has been impacted by my work with the Cartoon Museum, considering its commitment to celebrating zines, comics and other lowkey/individual means of documenting human stories. The diary & the museum. The institution & the individual. The catalogue & the comic. This would likely be an informal but impassioned ramble, littered with bad jokes and overexcited shouting. I love museums and I love stories!
-
Claire Mead
This is the tale of an unlikely love story. The tale of one museum professional falling in love with the subject of sword lesbians in art, museums and heritage during the first lockdown - leading to consulting with museums, a YouTube channel and a podcast. It's a story of women's history, LGBTQI heritage and why arms and armour collections can benefit from new perspecives from unexpected angles...of attack.
-
David Hingley
Celebrating MOfP’s first anniversary. Here at the Museum of Forward Planning our over-optimist and under-resourced team continue to ‘do more, with less, more often.’ With updates on our organisational mission, negotiable values and <vague holding statement about content here> - we’ll talk about imaginary things that would never happen in the museum where you work
-
Nick Clarke
£8000 in 18 months • National Jazz Archive fundraising concerts cancelled due to Covid. • What to do with hundreds of jazz books donated to the Archive that we’ve already got on the shelves? • Let’s send a smart sales leaflet to our supporters. • It works – 50 books sold in the first few days, and 1200 in 18 months, raising over £8000! • Would this work for other archives? Why not? Before the pandemic the National Jazz Archive organised four concerts every year that raised about £8000 to cover our costs for IT support, conservation materials, professional advice etc. Covid stopped all such events, but we still needed to raise money – what to do? Many jazz lovers offer us their collections of books and magazines when they are downsizing, or more often, their family and executors offer them after someone has died. But we already have 4500 books on jazz, so we can’t accept more copies of the same book – until now… In June 2020 I prepared a sales leaflet with 75 books on and sent it with our newsletter to 1800 people … and sold 50 books in a week for £400. It worked! Since then, I’ve sent out about 15 leaflets, and sold 1200 books for about £8000. Our fundraising concerts have started again, but I’m carrying on with these book sales for the time being as they give us a fresh source of funding. But more than that, they give us a direct connection with a lot of our supporters who eagerly await each new leaflet. I’ve had many messages from people giving us books, usually along the lines ‘Dad would have been so pleased to know that his books are going to people who’ll appreciate them, and raising money for such a good cause’. But … the books now occupy six lots of shelving in my basement. I spend four or five days every month scanning, listing, emailing, packing, posting… It’s a good thing I don’t have a day job. Would this work for other archives? I don’t see why not. If you’ve got a mailing list of supporters, if there are lots of books about your topic, if you’ve got one or two volunteers who like books, and who have the time and inclination to have a go at setting up a similar scheme, and space to store them – why not try it!