Well, that’s a relief. We are an Accredited Museum Service (or rather, a Museums Service which runs Accredited Museums). The MLA Accreditation Panel met on Friday, but I didn’t find out till yesterday. Apparently we were the first item on the list so… it may only be by twenty minutes or so, but technically we [...]
The final event of the conference was the address by the English Culture Minister, David Lammy (that’s Minister for Culture in England, btw, not Minister for English Culture). He was down to speak for twenty minutes, but overran by a further twenty. A sort of ‘buy one, get one free’. It was very interesting. Of [...]
Earnest, serious, dull. That is not, however, the definition of professionalism. Overrunning your time, stumbling delivery and reading from a script. I’m not going to name names, but the general quality level of the presentations at the conference was really low. I’m not talking particularly about the content, but rather the presentation and delivery, [...]
There’s certainly occasional food for thought, but as far as I can see precious little thought went into the food.
Meanwhile a variant on an old joke:
Q. What’s the worst thing about an interactive computer in a gallery?
A. The incessant whine that comes from the curator.
Continuing the Clash theme… well I am in a hotel in County Hall, which is after all by the river, and I can see the top half of the London Eye from my window…
So, here I am. And I take back what I said about the lunch - there were seats! Admittedly they were for [...]
Hmmm, I suspect that the Clash reference may date me rather accurately. No matter. Despite what I said here, I am going to the MA Conference in London, though I expect the Scottish contingent to be somewhat smaller than in previous years. We shall see if any of the interesting-looking sessions will live up to [...]
OK, so we didn’t win. But to be beaten in a category called ‘Innovation and IT in service delivery’ by something that is not by any stretch of the imagination innovative in an IT sense is a bit rich (and I’m sure the other genuinely innovative projects felt the same). And perhaps the site shouldn’t [...]
There seems to be something of a concerted campaign on denigration underway at the moment directed at Creative Commons in, amongst others, the Register and elsewhere. The attacks seem to be based on a combination of misinformation and a misapprehension of copyright law (one writer in particular being ignorant of the copyright law of the [...]
I wrote these a while ago, but I think they really belong here. After reading a report on how museum pay, particularly that of curators, has been falling begind that of comparable sectors, I was inspired to begin a parody of ‘Maria’ from the Sound of Music (suitably re-titled ‘Career’):
Career
[The scene: a department of Museum [...]
Dylan was telling me the other day about online surveys that SMC had conducted, and it seemed to me that it had been comparatively expensive for them, involving as it did the use of an external contractor. I suspect that it’s actually the analysis of the surveys that’s the expensive bit though. Still, for anyone [...]