Bob, it’s brilliant! This is exactly the sort of stuff that I think is most valuable to the list. Not “we only have £400k for marketing this year” but “we’re putting stuff together on a shoestring and hoping it flies”. So much more inspiring and interesting IMO.
So: thanks :-)
Would absolutely love to hear how your audiences use / respond to it when (if!) you ever have enough time to write about it.
Cheers
Mike
_____________
Mike Ellis
Thirty8 Digital: a small but perfectly formed digital agency
http://thirty8.co.uk
** NEW: an easy to use web publishing platform for museums: https://themuseumplatform.com **
** Workshops, courses and free downloads: https://trainingdigital.co.uk **
On 13 Jan 2020, 13:57 +0000, Bob Clark <[log in to unmask]>, wrote:
> OK. My caution is “is this really the sort of thing they are looking for, or is my thought that it might be simply hubris at our achievements?
>
> Auchindrain is in organisational terms a small independent museum is a very remote location in the rural west of Scotland. All of the small staff are generalists: two have curatorial backgrounds (including myself) but do only limited amounts of curatorial work as opposed to operational management or development. The very thought of having a digital specialist on the staff is laughable. No-one on the staff has anything more than “advanced home user” IT capacity, and we muddle through.
>
> Our museum is a historic site covering 22 acres, about which we know a great deal. But because it is a historic site (Scottish Category A listed), we are very seriously constrained as the amount of traditional interpretation – labels and panels – we can put out there. Traditionally, visitors were given a printed guidebook containing a limited amount of information and set out as a tour-route, and that was it. Deeply insufficient.
>
> Following an off-the-top-of-the-head suggestion by a teenage volunteer, in 20914 we started out on a brave and bold course – a very scary course for a small museum with no previous digital experience beyond Facebook and Microsoft Office – to develop a guide-tablet controlled by GPS and Bluetooth. There is a guided tour available, but the key point is that the tablet works out where you are and displays appropriate content. The concept is that the visitor carries with them what we would otherwise have liked to put on labels and panels. With grant support, we paid for a bespoke Android app, which runs on 10-inch Galaxy tablets. The site is divided into around 60 “waypoints”, for each of which there are at least two levels, and increasingly three – the full-length essay for this more interested. Alongside that we have links to bits of additional content not specific to a particular waypoint – click the link and, for example, you get a piece about the local Gaelic dialect. All words likely to be unfamiliar to the non-specialist reader are hyperlinked to a definition or explanation. At present, we are close to completion of a sub-project to present the app in Gaelic, German, Italian, French, Spanish and Dutch as well as English. We also have a projection of the app on our website at https://www.auchindrain.org.uk/explore-auchindrain/, which will also soon go multi-language.
>
> We’re quite proud of what we have achieved. If it is relevant to the present discussion, we think what we’ve done is pretty exceptional given our small size, lack of digital expertise and the fact that the key people involved have not been bright young things from the modern world!
>
> Now I will run and hide …. I would so much rather have talked this through with someone over the phone.
>
> Bob Clark
> Director of Auchindrain Township
>
> From: Museums Computer Group <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Mike Ellis
> Sent: 13 January 2020 12:12
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Can you help the Heritage Fund to find digital heritage stories that would inspire others?
>
> The full public view is kind of the point of belonging to a community of interest like the MCG :-)
>
> I’d be interested in hearing more, even if just a brief description. This is a good thread.
>
> _____________
>
> Mike Ellis
>
> Thirty8 Digital: a small but perfectly formed digital agency
> http://thirty8.co.uk
>
> ** NEW: an easy to use web publishing platform for museums: https://themuseumplatform.com **
> ** Workshops, courses and free downloads: https://trainingdigital.co.uk **
> On 13 Jan 2020, 11:46 +0000, Bob Clark <[log in to unmask]>, wrote:
>
> > My museum has a project that may well be very relevant to you. But can I talk to someone by phone rather than having to write a long explanation in full public view?
> >
> > Bob Clark
> > Director of Auchindrain Township
> >
> > From: Museums Computer Group <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Tom Steinberg
> > Sent: 13 January 2020 10:14
> > To: [log in to unmask]
> > Subject: Re: Can you help the Heritage Fund to find digital heritage stories that would inspire others?
> >
> > Dear MCG folks,
> >
> > Thanks so much for this lovely wave of ideas and suggestions, I'm so grateful. You've given me a lot to read, which I'll go through with great care.
> >
> > If I could just tweak my request a bit: if I challenged you all to name projects by organisations other than your own (or your client's) that you think are not merely interesting, but genuinely successful, what would you name? And why?
> >
> > thanks!
> >
> > Tom
> >
> >
> >
> > To unsubscribe from the MCG list, click the following link:
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> >
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