Regular round-up of news for Museums in Cambridgeshire from Gordon Chancellor, Museums Partnership Officer.

I am delighted to be able to tell you that my office has been awarded up to £90,000 for 2015-2016 from the ACE Museum Resilience Fund. I will be able to give more details over the next few weeks but in the meantime I quote from the ACE web site:

“With the support of funding from the Arts Council, Cambridgeshire County Council will build the capacity of Cambridgeshire’s independent museums, most of which are volunteer-run, to deliver improved customer service. This will be achieved by developing partnership-working across clusters of museums, with the emphasis on volunteer and trustee recruitment, training, co-ordination and management. The project will support 14 museums: Burwell Museum, Cromwell Museum, Chatteris Museum, Ely Museum, March and District Museum, The Norris Museum, St Neots Museum, Ramsey Rural Museum, Farmland Museum, Prickwillow Engine House Museum, Octavia Hill’s Birthplace House, Wisbech and Fenland Museum, Whittlesey Museum and Nene Valley Railway.”

I am also very pleased to let you know that The County Council and the University of Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology (MAA) have jointly secured a grant of £72,900 from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) for an exciting new exhibition called ‘The Archaeology of Childhood‘. My colleague Quinton Carroll, County Council Historic Environment Team Manager, says
“As far as we are aware, no-one has undertaken an exhibition like this before, and it has already raised much interest in academic and museums’ circles, so we anticipate a positive reaction from schools and the public.” I’m sure you will join me in congratulating Quinton and his team and MAA on this terrific award which looks really ground-breaking.

In my news of 23 January I mentioned Museums in Cambridgeshire’s ‘Memories in the Community’ reminiscence project funded by HLF. I can now report that we have appointed Emma Cook as Project Officer, and Nicola Power as evaluator.

Finally, and rather less exciting I’m afraid (!), I’d like to get a feel for what accounting software is being used in the County’s independent museums – rather in the way that people told me last year what collection management systems they were using. So I would be very grateful if you could please tell me what your museum uses? I should say this is just for my own purposes and will not be shared with others unless you want me to.