ZOOM onto the upcoming AMaGA series of Webinars

Audience Segmentation in Times of Crisis

Wednesday, 29 April 2020

3 - 4 PM AEST (VIC, NSW, QLD, ACT, TAS)
2:30 – 3:30 ACST (SA, NT)
1 - 2 PM AWST (WA)

Members: $20
Non-Members: $40

Join the AMaGA Evaluation and Visitor Research National Network (EVRNN) and Dr Lynda Kelly, for a webinar to discuss and speculate about the future for audiences online and onsite.

The aim is to discuss research and articles that are looking at the issue of audiences now and in the future – will business-as-usual really change? And, if so, how?

https://www.amaga.org.au/events/audience-segmentation-times-crisis

Networking: Not one size fits all

30th April 2020

1-2 PM AEST(VIC, NSW, QLD, ACT, TAS)

12:30 – 1:30 PM ACST (SA, NT) 11AM - 12 Noon AWST (WA)

Members: $20 Non-Members: $40   Emerging Professionals Network Members: $0 
Network members tickets are subsidised by the Emerging Professionals Network

The AMaGA Emerging Professionals National Network ask our panel of special guests what networking has meant for them. Now it is more important than ever to build meaningful connection within our industry and to learn how we can support each other to make the sector stronger.

Can networking create opportunities?

Do you have to be an extrovert to effectively network?

How to make the most of your new connection.

Using your networks to start working for yourself.

https://www.amaga.org.au/events/networking-not-one-size-fits-all

Caring for Collections during Closure

Friday 1 May

2pm – 3pm AEST (VIC, NSW, QLD, ACT, TAS)

12-1pm AWST (WA)

1.30-2.30 ACST (SA, NT)

Members: $20.00

Non-Members: $40.00

This May Day, join AMaGA, Grimwade Conservation Services and Margaret Birtley AM, for a webinar on how to best care for collections with limited access. This session will explore and expand on the Australian Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Material’s (AICCM) valuable ‘Closed by COVID’ resource. The Grimwade team will share practical advice and respond to questions about caring for specific materials at a distance. Our panellists will also look to the coming months and discuss returning to work, preparing for reopening and the ongoing ramifications of COVID-19 on collection care.

https://www.amaga.org.au/events/caring-collections-during-closure

Digitisation: Basics and Fundamentals

6^th May 2020

3 - 4 PM AEST (VIC, NSW, QLD, ACT, TAS) 2:30 – 3:30 ACST (SA, NT) 1 - 2 PM AWST (WA)
Non-Members: $60

Members: $30

Join AMaGA Western Australia and a panel of professionals, for a webinar on the basic and fundamental standards, procedure, equipment and storage when undertaking a digitisation project.

Plan – The procedure for digitisation, workflow and processes;

Prepare – The equipment for digitisation, including specifications for digitisation equipment;

Digitise – The standards in which collection items should be digitised to;

Share – Storage, digital display and digital access to digitised collections.

This webinar is targeted toward Community Museums and Galleries who are at the start of their digitisation process. All members are welcome, but the information and speakers have tailored the event to smaller organisations.

https://www.amaga.org.au/events/digitisation-basics-and-fundamentals

St Helens History Room powering on

‘On Yer Bike!’ 

This article is #2 in our series about the impact of COVID19 on museums and staff. Thankyou Kym Matthews for your contribution. 

The St Helens History Room was closed to the public on Weds 25^th March 2020 but we are still arranging displays for when we can have visitors again.  In the foyer cabinet display at the centre there is a tribute to Anzac Day for those residents who frequent Service Tasmania.

We are also pleased to share the latest images of the exhibition  ‘On Yer Bike!’  This display was planned for the inaugural MTB race ‘Dragon Trail’ for late March 2020 that was subsequently cancelled.  There are some beautiful historic images of locals and their bikes plus a pictorial history on the Cycling Club of St Helens.  

We have rotated another cabinet inside the museum this time where the history of the property ‘Bowood’ is on display.  Even though this important property is not within the municipal boundaries, the common thread here to St Helens is the donor, who used to reside here, and that his family brought the Midland Hunting Club to St Helens for events on the Coast. 

Keep checking  our website where we will soon be uploading the latest video via youtube for a virtual tour. 

There will be more changes to come within the museum that we will let you know about.      

Meanwhile stay home and stay well everyone…..see you on the other side!

Kym Matthews

Curator

22^nd April 2020

 

‘For the Foreseeable Future’: Tasmanian museums and the pandemic

Signage from the Tasmanian Wool Centre

This article is #1 in a series we hope to bring you about the impact of COVID19 on museums and staff. A committee initiative starting with this piece by Elizabeth Bondfield a museum worker at two small Tasmanian museums-COMA Tasmania a medical museum in Jane Franklin Hall, a university college in South Hobart, and the Tasmanian Wool Centre is in Ross in the Midlands. Like all museums large or small across Australia each museum has closed in response to the pandemic. 

'Like every other museum worker (volunteer or paid) I have experienced some big changes in the last few weeks, and I’ve been asked to reflect on those. You might find you have some experiences in common. One thing I’ve learned in my working life is that our museums offer us a collective wisdom or ‘brains-trust’. When we talk together and share our experiences, we can learn from each other.

So back in March, at COMA we were organising one of our seminars, a major fundraiser for the year. ‘The Witches’ Cauldron’ was (or will be?) about the medical history of South Hobart and the Hobart Rivulet. We had eminent historians presenting talks on 19^th century public health and miasma theory, a polio epidemic and childbirth in the Female Factory. We had a great response from the public – we’d worked hard to spread the word through flyers, our Friends, through posters in local cafes and through professional networks. At the same time, we were watching the news, and our healthcare professional volunteers and attendees were starting to mutter that we might all be in lock-down by March 21, the date of the seminar.

CANCELLED!

Sure enough, on about March 10 we got the news from the college that the event couldn’t go ahead. We had to protect our audience, our students, our volunteers and staff. So began a painstaking task of contacting all our RSVPs – and we were thankful for our RSVP list!- and letting them know it couldn’t go ahead. Our scheduled guided tours were cancelled – another source of revenue. Some of our audience kindly offered the fee as a donation to help us.

For now, I am working with our volunteers to develop our new website for the future. We are no longer allowed to work onsite at the college as it is in complete lock-down to protect the student residents – so my plans to present digital guided tours of our collection on a mobile phone are on hold for now. I am focussing on preparing our database to go online. Thankfully our files and our collection data are on a shared drive and we can access them from home. We need to prepare a newsletter to talk with our Friends and our public, explaining the closure. We wonder if we might be able to present our seminar in September, but are also wondering about presenting it as a webinar.

At the Wool Centre the trajectory was similar: we went from planning a calendar of public programs, preparing to launch a membership program, and researching topics for our exhibition development to having to put it all on hold. Again I felt we had something ready to fly that got shot in the wing. Again, we saw a creeping trajectory – first the programs had to be postponed ‘for the foreseeable future’, then the Museum and finally the Wool Centre entirely were closed. At the Wool Centre there are some 10 part time staff, and our managers are applying for assistance to support them all.

It is rare to see your worst case scenario actually happen, but this time every time I thought ‘No, this surely can’t get any worse’ it has. I am grateful though that the actual worst – our volunteers, staff, students, visitors or the Ross local community getting sick with the virus – hasn’t happened.

At both museums we are licking our wounds at present and trying to work out how to plan past the closure and out the other side. We are wondering what that ‘other side’ might look like.

3 months? 6 months? 12 months? 18 months? How long will our museums be closed? How do we even begin to plan when we don’t even know those simple things? Are there ways we can help our audiences access our collections and our stories during the closure?

How can we prepare for our museums re-opening to our volunteers, our staff, and our visitors?

As you can imagine I was feeling pretty down the other day, when a colleague of mine encouraged me to imagine the future a bit more positively. It seems unlikely that we’ll be closed ‘forever’, even if we don’t know yet when we will be able to open. At best, a vaccine is about 18 months away, but if the virus is contained within Tasmania it is possible to imagine freedom of movement within our borders again. Then I started to imagine a lot of bored, lonely Tasmanians – eager to get moving, to see people’s faces for real rather than on Zoom, to see real things and make things or learn something new not on the internet but in what my geek friends call ‘the big blue room’: the ‘real world’. I can imagine an important role for our museums in that future. As one of my bosses Deb said the other day: ‘This too shall pass.’

How has your museum responded to the pandemic closure? How are you planning for the future?'

We would welcome any stories from your museum-a word document and a bonus jpg or two sent to museumstasmania@gmail.com and we can publish!