Working with Maldon Museum in the Park
Our second marvellous micromuseum!
We worked with the Chair, Curator and and a lovely group of volunteers at Maldon to put together a new style of interpretive labelling for several of their themed rooms. This was a wonderfully collaborative project with learning opportunities for all of us. Maldon has a fine collection and many personal stories to tell.
What did the volunteers learn from us?
We began the project with a series of Zoom sessions, introducing the volunteers to Interpretation. We set these up to fit with the volunteer’s schedules, so mostly in the evenings and both weekdays and weekends.
We successfully
- Agreed the outline project and recruited a small team of volunteers
- Held a session on Freeman Tilden and the origins and ideas of interpretation
- Held a session on creating in Interpretation Plan
- Held a session on writing and making labels
- Set up an appealing ‘as if’ feedback mechanism for visitors to report on how much the original labels related, revealed and provoked them
- Agreed and allocated tasks for the implementation stage
What we implemented
Following their research, we worked with the volunteers to write and edit the new labels. We considered a number of theoretical and practical aspects of the text and the physical labels and how they would fit in the display areas. These sessions were held at the museum, where we could see the objects and consider the visitor experience more directly.
We successfully
- Held a practical session in the museum to create a first draft of the labels, ensuring they followed the interpretation plan we had created
- Held an editing session, where we completely rewrote the labels, several times!
- Discussed the tone and voice of the labels, framing them in the first person. This led to discussions about how much we could presume about these past lives, and the beleifs and opinions of the characters.
- Settled on the final, final texts of the labels and alongside some minor presentational changes, launched the new labels
Anecdotal evidence from volunteers and also comments in the Visitors Book suggest that the new labelling style is popular with visitors. We will repeat the Relate. Reveal Provoke feedback to get comparative data from before/after at the equivalent time of year. In the meantime, Maldon decided to extend the labelling to their summer display on the subject of Maldon Heroes.