Working with Ashdon Village Museum
Our first marvellous micromuseum!
We worked with the Curator and Trustees of Ashdon Museum from early 2020. The AVM is a wonderful example of a village museum, with a rich and varied collection showing the history of lives in the village. In particular it has retained a strong knowledge of stories that attach to its objects. However, like many small museums, it relies very heavily on one Curator and a small band of volunteers to operate.
What did we do during lockdown?
During the lockdown periods, we worked on a number of tasks to ‘take the museum out to the community‘ in a variety ways. We not only took the museum outside its building to help support a stronger village community, but we aimed to build an appetite for visiting and engaging with the museum post-lockdown.
We successfully
- Revised the museum’s website to give greater capacity for information sharing about all the activities going on
- Worked with the local primary school on syllabus themes using museum resources
- Tweeted regularly on the museum’s behalf, introducing it to the wider museum sector
- Developed and managed a Facebook page enabling community conversations about village memories
- Created QR codes displayed around the village, linking to a webpage that shows an old photo of the same spot and describes the view at the date of the photo
- Wrote an article for the Parish magazine launching the museum’s new channels for engagement
What did we do after lockdown?
We worked with the museum to develop a Spectrum 5 compliant cataloguing system. This is a very large and daunting task for the museum as they currently have no central catalogue but an estimated 20,000 objects.
We successfully
- Worked with the trustees to explore ways of making the task ‘bitesize’
- Planned ways to get volunteers involved with recording
- Balanced concerns about risk and urgency versus getting the framework and processes right first time and manageable in an all-volunteer setting
- Demonstrated software and hard-copy options
- Presented to volunteers the importance of cataloguing, while building their confidence that the task at hand was achievable (with the help of cake!)