Perry

I am enjoying this thread being a blog fan. In answer to your question about Local Authority museums in Scotland we have 32 Local Authorities and they run roughly 125 museums among them all. Some seasonal etc, but it's a starting figure if you are interested.

Pete did some great work in raising the use of technology in museums in Scotland, I hope this thread can encourage some more participation in these areas.

Mark


Mark Macleod
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-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bonewell, Perry
Sent: 20 January 2009 09:48
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Do any council run museums have blogs?

Thanks for that Peter - it is good to take a pragmatic approach,
providing you have that luxury.

The East Lothian blog was the only example by a council museum that I
could find via Google when I started looking into this.

It would be interesting to find out what proportion of MCG mambers and
subscribers to this list also work in local authority museums.

In fact how many LA museums are there in the UK - does anyone know?

Perry


-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Pete Gray
Sent: 19 January 2009 22:56
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Do any council run museums have blogs?

I may have missed a response, but it looks like there hasn't been one so
far from a council museum with a blog. There is however at least one in
the UK - East Lothian Museums <http://www.eastlothianmuseums.org/blog>
which started in January 2006. I should know as it was me that set it
up, but as I'm now in another job (and in New Zealand), I'm not sure
that I can strictly comment on the current reasons for it, though it
does seem that Sarah at least is keeping it going.

I set it up for a number of reasons, one of which was simply to see what
would happen (much the same reason I had for starting to use Flickr).
I'd been made aware on more than one occasion that not only did the
public have no idea what it was that we did, none of my colleagues in
other parts of the council did either (members of the public, for
example were always astounded when they found out how few of us there
actually were). The main reason ISTR was to have a way of talking about
the stuff that we did in a more informal tone of voice; that would let
us talk about ideas, events and the day-to-day reality of working for
ELMS in a way that just wouldn't work on either the main museum site or
the corporate ELC site; and to do so in a way that would enable a
conversation with readers. And of course, one that would avoid the
po-faced gung-ho enthusiasm of the many corporate blogs that were
springing up at the time mostly written, it would seem, by their PR
departments.

I was also lucky in that at ELC I was able to have a separate web
presence for the museums service, and didn't suffer from the
control-freak paranoia that characterises most council IT and PR
departments.

Was it worth it? I think so. But there so many other avenues we could
also have made use of if only we had the staff resources. For example, I
wanted to make use of Bebo rather than Facebook, because that's what all
the teenagers in East Lothian were using (you have to consider the
demographics of your audience). Staff participation in the end is the
biggest stumbling block. We tend to worry a lot about the specific
technologies, applications, delivery methods and so on, which in the end
are trivial compared with the problem of getting people to actually
create the content.

By the way, if anyone's looking for a really easy-to-use for non-geeks
content management system, can I recommend Website Baker
<http://www.websitebaker.org/> - it's the best I've found and for ease
of use knocks Drupal, Joomla _and_ all the commercial CMSs I've used
into a cocked hat.

Best wishes from Wanganui

Pete

Pete Gray
Deputy Culture and Community Manager
Office of Community and Cultural
Wanganui District Council

Telephone Number: 06 3491000
FAX: 06 3490000
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