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

This week’s items that may be of interest…

1. The new MiC web site is almost ready for launch and I can report that it will be good! It would be nice however is to get more up to date photos from museums, so if you have taken some good shots lately – for which you have consent for online use – do please send them to me.
2. A reminder that the South and East Museums Federation AGM will be held in Oxford on 16 July. The details should soon go up soon on semfed.org.uk. As well as getting together for the usual opportunities to meet colleagues from all walks of museum life, it is an opportunity to meet staff from the Museum of Oxford, the Story Museum and the new Weston Wing of the Bodleian library and see how they are all using poems and stories to connect with different audiences.
3. This year’s ‘Summer at the Museums’ will run in Cambridgeshire museums from 23 July to 2 September. As we have come to expect, this year has a great programme of activities, events and trails across the University and independent museums. The details are at cam.ac.uk/museums/summer or contact Susan Miller on sem96@cam.ac.uk.
4. The next SHARE Front of House Forum meeting is at Chelmsford Museum on 11 June and the Fitzwilliam Museum has generously offered free spaces in their mini-bus to anyone from Cambridge who may need a lift to to the meeting. The mini-bus will leave at 7.30am from Trumpington Street as near to the Fitzwilliam as possible, but if you want to go please contact Linda Brooklyn in good time on lmb26@cam.ac.uk.
5. There is an excellent session by the SHARE Digital Development Forum on the possibilities of the Raspberry Pi computer. This will be at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge on the afternoon of 4 June. For details go to sharemuseumseast.org.uk.
6. Can I draw your attention to the Jonathan Ruffer grants to curators run by the Art Fund (see http://www.artfund.org/supporting-museums/jonathan-ruffer-curatorial-grants)?
7. There are two new volunteer roles and a paid traineeship currently advertised by UCM at http://www.cam.ac.uk/museums-and-collections/get-involved.

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?

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

Firstly, this week I have a request! In preparation for Volunteer Week in June do you by any chance have any good museum volunteer stories, preferably with photos, that could be used on social media to promote museum volunteering? Any help would be appreciated. I attach a consent form for any good photos of the volunteers you may have – these may be used on social media.

Secondly, can I draw your attention to two vacancies this week:

1. Development Officer at Fitzwilliam, closing date 19 May (see attached).

2. HLF are recruiting for a full-time permanent Grants Officer, based in Cambridge, closing date 25 May.

I would also like to give you provisional notice that the Museums in Cambridgeshire (MiC) AGM has been set for 14 September at Peterborough Museum. I hope to confirm this shortly.

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

There’s lots of interesting stuff this week:

1. On 2nd July SHARE will be launching a brand new network, the Volunteer Co-ordinators Forum (VCF), at the National Horseracing Museum in Newmarket on 2 July. The VCF is for anyone whose role involves co-ordinating a volunteer programme and managing volunteers at a museum or heritage site in the East of England. The Forum will meet quarterly and events will include a mix of national and local speakers, peer support and networking opportunities. The Launch Event is your opportunity to shape the forum and suggest key topics for future meetings so that the forum meets your needs, and will include a keynote from Rob Jackson, who has written, spoken and trained on volunteer programme management internationally for over twenty years. Find out more and book your place on the SHARE website.

2. The next SHARE Front of House Forum will take place on 11 June at Chelmsford Museum, with a focus on reaching and engaging audiences. There will be a keynote from John Orna-Ornstein (Director of Museums with Arts Council England) on attracting wider audiences, plus sessions from local and national speakers. View the full programme and book your place online.  View all upcoming SHARE events on the SHARE website.

3. The Museum of Cambridge are advertising two posts, both with closing dates on 26 May: ‘Capturing Cambridge Project Manager’ and ‘Learning and Community Engagement Officer’.

4. The two Cambridgeshire Museum Volunteer Co-ordinator posts which I announced last week.

5. The South and East Museums Federation’s next study day is on 13 May: Join them for a behind the scenes visit to the Museum and Gallery at the birthplace of Thomas Gainsborough in Sudbury. With galleries, historic garden, current exhibition ‘Artists at Home and at Work’ and working print workshop they’ll be plenty to see and discuss. Full details and booking here.

6. Over the coming months I will be keen to hear what your training needs for the coming year might be, so that I can feed this information into SHARE’s plans. If you have any strong views about this, please do drop me a line.

7. SHARED Enterprise has an excellent training event on ‘Developing Your Friends Group’ on 4 June at Cambridge Museum of Technology.This training is for any museums and museum friends groups wishing to develop their working relationship. The day should ideally be attended by the Chair of the Friends Group and the Museum Manager together, in order to fully benefit from the training. Museums wanting to start a new friends group will also benefit from attending this course. Click here to book.

8. Finally, you might want to check out these online Leicester courses.

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

There are plenty of opportunities this week:

1. I am recruiting two Museum Volunteer Co-ordinators to work across Cambridgeshire museums, closing date 11 May.
   Museum Volunteer Co-ordinator advert
2. The Fitzwilliam is looking for a PA to the Director
3. The University of Cambridge Museums have a vacancy for an Audience Research Volunteer to work 25 May to 14 June, and for 16-18 year olds for Conservation Work Experience in August. Details online.
4. Museums at Night (May 13-16) is now less than a month away, and there are over 550 events registered at museumsatnight.org.uk. Do you know of any other events taking place in your area that might not have been registered yet? You can do this online by 5pm this Friday, 24 April. The hashtag for this year’s festival is #MatN2015, if you’d like to tweet or Instagram about it.
5. The Collections Trust has some free workshops on two open source and free-to-use tools developed during the AthenaPlus project. The first, MOVIO, is a tool to build online virtual exhibitions. The second, CityQuest, allows you to easily create a quest online, and publish it to a mobile app.
6. Following last year’s successful Reminiscence Day, the Denny Abbey Farmland Museum is repeating the experience this year. It will take place at Denny Abbey Farmland Museum on Wednesday 17 June, between 10.30am and 5.00pm.The day is designed for care staff to pick up some new ideas and meet others in the field, and also for cared-for residents and anyone wishing to reminisce.
   Reminiscence Day