Hi, I’m Valerie Ma, I am on a degree course, Museum and Gallery Studies from the University of Leicester.
Salisbury Museum was the unique museum I wanted to experience on my placement because it houses the best archaeological collections in the country. Due to the pandemic situation, I was having my placement remotely from China. As we known, it might be a tricky experience doing an online placement. However, I was impressed by the project I was working on and I am really enjoying this experience online.
The particular experience I really enjoyed was that my supervisor discussed me with my findings about volunteer recruitment after I presented my thoughts to her, and she would ask about my thought about these findings. It was truly helpful from my point that I was supervised and it gave me an opportunity to think about the questions critically. The volunteer recruitment project has given me practice in researching and in analytic thinking about organizations like museums and their volunteers.
I appreciated the chance of the placement online at Salisbury Museum and I spent happy moments in conversations with the museum staff. It is the first work experience after I had my own family and it is a new beginning for my museum studies which are different from my subjects at university in China.
I also enjoyed a cup of Chinese green tea when having my placement with my supervisor and colleagues!
I was also engaging with the exhibition of “Alongsiding” which is the dialogue between contemporary and historic photographic works in the National Art council collection, and the practice of this by contemporary artist, Anna Lucas. Simultaneously, I was engaging with the archive works of Anna’s with my group members and these archive collections demonstrating made successfully. The theme of the exhibition “Alongsiding” is looking, looking through, looking away, looking again, looking with: a new term for an act of shared looking, mediated through the photographic still as an object on film.
“Alongsiding” is a new term for what happens when we look through a lens with others. It can bring more to the viewers, widely interpreted as a stance, of solidarity, togetherness and intimacy.
The green tea is familiar enough, but I suspect “Alongsiding” is new to most of us. Thank you Valerie. We are sorry not to have met you in person. Perhaps one day….
Hello! My name is Caroleen and I am one of four students who undertook a summer placement with The Salisbury Museum as part of my MA in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. Prior to COVID-19 I was selected to do a physical placement at The Salisbury Museum in which I would have undertaken many different tasks relating to the collections, and the National Lottery Heritage Fund project but due do COVID-19 plans had to be changed. Instead the placement was 100% digital with all the meetings being conducted over Zoom, and all of the tasks being digitally oriented. For the duration of the two month placement I completed all the work from my hometown in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada which is located between Toronto and Niagara Falls in Southern Ontario.
There were two key topics in which the placement tasks fell under: online presence and online learning resources. For the online presence tasks, another student and myself chose to tackle the museum’s social media presence (the other aspect was tackling the website and YouTube content). The first part of the task involved creating a document outlining best practices for how museums should be using social media. The second part of the tasks involved auditing The Salisbury Museum’s social media accounts and suggesting improvements based on the best practices previously researched. This part of the placement was extremely interesting for me as it provided insight into what does and doesn’t work in regards to how museums present themselves online, and has also proved to be quite rewarding as the museum has already implemented some of our suggestions!
The second topic revolved around brainstorming and creating online learning resources targeted at families and/or formal learning (more specifically Key Stage 3). For this task all of us students began researching what other museums or heritage sites had created for this type of resource to spur inspiration. Select locations that I looked into included the Tate, Westminster Abbey, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, and The Science Museum (London). I also research the UK curriculum for Key Stage 3 as I had no idea what it comprised of as I am Canadian. From this initial research I brainstormed three different ideas that could be developed into an actual online learning resource. The first idea was to select several paintings from The Salisbury Museum’s online collection and create activities that educate the families/students on aspects of art history. The second was to develop a video series based on the evolution of objects in the collection, ie an inkwell to a ball-point pen. And the third idea I had was to create instructions to make your own historic dress costume from items around the house.
Through discussions with the museum staff, Emma, Rachel, and Owain, the first two ideas were a hit! I spent two weeks developing the painting activities which turned in to word-encryption games where the goal was to fill in missing words among a paragraph of text that described the painting and it’s historical context. The word-encryption games including a wordsearch, unscrambling words, and using a code to discover key words in the text. I also developed rough scripts for the object evolution video series which included the comparison between a Winchester bushel and measuring cups, analogue clock and digital clock, and inkwell and pen.
Overall the placement was quite enjoyable. The museum staff were lovely, and despite not being there in person, by viewing some of the museum offices and galleries in images and videos, it definitely felt that I was a part of the team!
Image 1: Picture of my workspace throughout the placement
So this is what we look like from Canada! Thank you Caroleen! We look forward to meeting you one day…
I am Yang Liu, a student of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. I was assigned a 2-month distance placement with Salisbury Museum between July and September.
Yes it’s right, a DISTANCE placement, with Salisbury in Britain and me in China. How could it be? Hard to imagine!!! However, it turns out nothing is impossible in a society with IT technology highly developed.
Although I couldn’t visit the museum in person because of the epidemic of corona virus, I could look up the necessary materials on its website and communicate with the group members through video meetings during which we reported our progress and put forward suggestions on the project. Here I must convey my great gratitude to Emma, Rachel and all the others from the museum. Our team participated in the project only as volunteers, but they valued every piece of our opinion, offered very patient help to our survey and built a smooth fast communication channel between the museum and our team. They deserve our great respect.
Now the placement is approaching its end. Reflecting on our performance in every phase, I should say that I have learned a lot through this placement project.
With two online meetings with the museum every week, I feel so close to it, more a member than a volunteer. When I told my classmates in other placement programmes that I contributed my suggestions for the improvement of the Salisbury Museum website and developed interesting online activities for its target visitors, they were all shocked and even envied me. We had regular work conferences every week but some of them were contacted by their museums only once every few weeks. Never will I forget the vivid images of these meetings, — we always had endless topics to talk about and we enjoyed so much laughter together. Very thankful to my group mates and everyone from the Salisbury Museum, you are so kind and lovely!
Since we are all locked at home, we have confronted too much trouble in our placement. However, every coin has two sides. It is also because of this inconvenience that people begin to realize the importance of online resources and more visitors come to the websites of the museums from around their communities, which in return motivates the museums to put more time, more material and human resources to their websites. Consequently, the shortcomings are found, improvements are made, more online activities are created, and the museums become more and more popular among the visitors. It’s a win-win situation for everyone. I am also happy for the fast development of the Salisbury museum.
Besides the achievements I mentioned above, the biggest advantage for me is the experience I gained from this placement. I have learned how to handle hard times with patience and to dig possibility from impossibility. No matter how “imperfect” a person or an institution looks, development will make it perfect, only if we have a pair of observing eyes and a heart to pursue progress.
What’s most important, success can never be set apart from diligence and intelligence and teamwork always means high efficiency. Only by learning more and working harder can I find imperfections and work out a way to make them closer to perfection. The process may be difficult, but every little step forward can be enormously satisfying. Whatever I devote to it, will eventually be rewarded in some way.
This placement is really a valuable experience. I will miss my group members, my university coordinators and all the staff from the museum. Thank you very much for your support.
Thank you Yang Liu for your contribution, and for some thought-provoking ideas about how to overcome adversity. We hope to meet you in person one day.
Hi everyone! I’m Amelia and I am one of the Museum Studies Masters students from the University of Leicester working with the museum for the summer. I am originally from Canada and since COVID hit in March I have returned home to live with my parents in the small village of Colborne, Ontario, about an hour and a half outside of Toronto.
*Fun Fact* The village of Colborne is in the middle of apple country and is the home of the Big Apple Pie Company, a lovely roadside attraction that as well as making an excellent apple pie, also takes COVID very seriously.
The main attraction is the 35ft tall apple with an observation deck on top. You can also enjoy a lovely round of mini golf or take a spin on the Go-Kart track. But you must be careful when visiting the petting zoo as they have an infamous llama that enjoys spitting on mischievous passersby.
I’ve always been interested in history, with my undergraduate Honours BA in just that from York University in Toronto. I’d always loved museums, practically grew up in them, but it wasn’t until I was studying abroad in York, UK during my third year of undergrad that I realized I wanted to work in museums. On a visit to the V&A, I had the delight to see the Disobedient Objects exhibition. This was my first look at how museums could address issues of social justice. Never before had a museum hit me to my core and I instantly knew that I wanted to be a part of an institution that produced exhibitions as moving as the one I had just encountered.
Almost five years after that epiphany moment, and I was starting my masters at Leicester and eventually making my way to YOU!
The last eight weeks working with Emma, Rachel and many other members of the Salisbury team has been my first experience of really working in a museum setting (I had previously been an information guide volunteer at the Art Gallery of Ontario, but had never contributed to a museum in this way). And I have to say I have absolutely LOVED every minute of it. The placement project has been focused on digital engagement in all its various forms, something that due the current circumstances is very important for the sustainability of museums. Going into the placement I didn’t really know much about museums and digital resources, besides the few lectures we had received at school about it. But I am proud to say that I am walking away with so much knowledge on digital practices!
My fellow students and I began by looking at social media best practices and, even though I am a millennial and have practically grown up in the social media craze, there was still so much for me to learn. Did you know that there was a proper way to hashtag??? Neither did I!! Now I do.
(It’s called CamelCase if you were wondering. Make sure that each new word in your hashtag begins with a capitol letter and you will be #AllGood)
This little writing desk is where I have spent many hours since returning to Canada due to COVID. The window looks out to the street which allows for a nice little people, and the occasional squirrel, watching break.
Our next task was to develop digital learning resources for families or for formal learning. This was the task that I was perhaps most afraid of. I have very little experience coding or making anything digital on the computer (I had a very short-lived blog for about a month back during my year abroad and studied graphic design while in high school). But once discussing with Emma what the museum was expecting from us, I began to feel more comfortable. I began to look at what other museums were doing during this time and realized that I could TOTALLY come up with digital learning resources. In fact, … I came up with five. Turns out my years of working at a children’s summer camp really did come in handy and with the right software those graphic design skills came right back!
I ended up developing an activity based on some of the coins in the collection, which saw families learn a little bit about the history of coins, from the Romans all the way to modern day, and even had them making their own currency and coins! I attempted to try to make math fun with this activity and suggested that children use their coins to purchase things from their home (I hope that through this I have inspired a whole generation of children to become coin historians!!! … or mathematicians and bankers). I also developed a story activity where children came up with their own stories for the objects in the Drainage Collection. As we don’t really know who these objects belonged to or where they really came from, I thought this was a great way for children to use their imagination. I even suggested to Emma that this activity become an annual story writing contest for local children.
These are the first drafts of the activity sheets I created! Hopefully by the time you are reading this they are up on the website for everyone to enjoy.
I am looking forward to taking the digital skills I have learned over the last eight weeks and applying them to my future roles in museums. I am so thankful to have had this experience as museums are now being forced to turn to more digital mediums due to the pandemic. I believe that museums were slowly inching their way towards being more accessible through the web and digital offerings. But like everything new and scary, it takes an unexpected external force to really push you towards what you have been putting off.
I have truly enjoyed my time working with the Salisbury Museum and am so devastated that I have not been able to be there in person. Rachel has been really great about doing some Facebook Live videos over the last few weeks to show us around the museums and there are some truly incredible pieces. I think my favourite object I have seen so far has been the cauliflower ceramic teapot and plate. They remind me of the lettuce dining set that was once owned by Barbara and Frank Sinatra. There are some really incredible looking objects in the collection, and I can’t wait till I can return to the UK and come to Salisbury and experience it all for myself!
Thank you Amelia. Great to hear from you, and also to hear how much you have enjoyed it all. We look forward to meeting you in person. Soon!
Emily Smith is currently studying for her MA in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. As part of her course she is doing a placement at the museum working on the cataloguing of the art collection. Below is her second blog about her placement here.
Hello, it’s Emily again!
I am now half way through my collections placement with Salisbury Museum and I am still loving it! Tracy McLelland and I have made great progress with the fine art picture stores, managing to complete one whole chest. This has involved a lot of rummaging around and detailing our findings on the infamous MODES.
I have managed to get to grips with MODES now and I feel really lucky to be adding to the work of so many others before me who have documented the many wonderful things that Salisbury Museum has collected. There is not too long to go until I finish my placement so Tracy and I are hoping to finish as much as we can. We will be starting a new task next week, where we will be trying to find the items we haven’t ticked off yet. This process can only be compared to a treasure hunt where you need to follow all the clues to (hopefully!) find the item we are looking for. Fingers crossed these next few weeks won’t go too quickly as I am really enjoying my placement and I don’t want it to end!
Hello! My name is Lisette. I am a new volunteer here at Salisbury Museum, and I have been asked to contribute to the museum’s new blog. I thought I’d begin my first post by telling you a little bit about myself and what I am going to be doing at the museum.
I am a postgraduate student at the University of Leicester, where I am currently studying for my MA in Museum Studies. As part of my course I am on a two month curatorial internship at Salisbury Museum, where I will be helping to curate the next temporary exhibition, and keeping you all updated on developments at the museum via this blog!
I have joined the museum at a very exciting time. Salisbury Museum was recently awarded £1.8 million by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) towards the development of a new archaeology gallery. The museum’s collections include some of the most significant archaeological finds in Britain, including artefacts from the Stonehenge World Heritage Site, the Pitt Rivers Wessex collection, and the Amesbury Archer. The new gallery will reveal treasures from deep prehistory up until 1220, and unearth the stories of the archaeologists that discovered them. The gallery will enable visitors to discover important artefacts that the museum has previously been unable to display due to a lack of space and security, and to rediscover old favourites from the collection. The development of the new gallery is the first part of an ambitious Master Plan that will see the museum completely overhauled, and displays brought into the 21st Century. The new gallery is set to open in Spring 2014.
As some of you who have recently visited the museum may know, the archaeology collections are currently packed away while the new gallery is being built. In total 3,200 objects were packed away with the help of 39 volunteers who contributed a staggering 827 hours of their time – but more about that in my next post.
The temporary exhibition that I am helping to curate will reveal the process of developing this new archaeology gallery, offering the viewer a chance to discover a little more about the inner workings of the museum. Visitors will also get a chance to see some of the project staff’s favourite objects from the archaeology collections and discover why they chose them. The temporary exhibition can be viewed at the museum between 12th October – 18th January 2014.
Having arrived at the museum in the middle of this mammoth project, it was thought that it might be fun for me to catch up on everything that has been happening via a blog. In the coming weeks I will be talking to staff and volunteers about the various stages of this exciting project to redevelop Salisbury Museum!