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

1. Can I ask you to consider (rather urgently) helping the Fitzwilliam Museum to ‘Win an Artist’? The Fitzwilliam is one of five institutions in competition to win contemporary artist Alinah Azadeh to conduct a Museums at Night event on Friday 30 October. If successful, the Museum will work with community groups, staff and online audiences to capture stories/artwork of people’s responses to works in the collections. These Hidden Histories will be shared, and more captured, in a special intervention to be devised by Alinah at the Museum later this year. The Fitzwilliam Museum is currently in fourth place and needs your support to make their proposal a reality, so please visit http://bit.ly/alinahazadeh to vote. Unfortunately voting closes tomorrow, Saturday 16 May1
2. Further to my mention of this in newsletter no. 10, my MDO colleagues from the region are asking all their museums via Survey Monkey what areas they would like training in. We can then feed the results into the SHARE training calendar for September 2015 to May 2016. Your anonymous answers to these questions will help me learn what training you would like, in which parts of the county is it most needed, what obstacles may be preventing you attending training so I can help provide solution and how well Cambridgeshire museums are able to access training other than that provided by SHARE. I can’t promise that every piece of training requested will be provided, but I will endeavour to support the areas of greatest need. Please tick as many that you think you/your museum would benefit from and also feel free to make suggestions in the “other” box. To complete this survey, click https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/2NNW9RB. Don’t forget to circulate it to your colleagues, including volunteers and trustees!
3. I would also like to take the opportunity to mention the very impressive events at this year’s arts festival in Wisbech. For details go to http://thebrinksfestival.org/.
4. Finally, can you please tell me if you are using AIM’s Visitor Verdict system, and if so maybe tell me (in confidence) whether you have found it useful for your museum?