The Ministry of Curiosity on how to be a museum social media guru and not get fired.

Hello all you lovely followers! The Ministry offices are buzzing and we are so absolutely thrilled to be heading up to Manchester to give our keynote at the Museums Association’s Moving On Up seminar (#mou2014). We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what we could share of our experience as young museum professionals and museum bloggers and came up with a talk that focuses on self-branding in the sector and how to live the social media highlife and not get fired.

Manchester we are coming for you...

Let’s be honest - these days social media and museums go hand in hand. There is already an amazing, dynamic and established online community of museum people. Add to this the number of museums that have fantastic, engaging social media accounts (big up to the Horniman, Grant Museum, Barts Pathology and Science Museum) and it seems like a no brainer that all museums would love their staff to be repping them online. (Cough- no, false) For the most part navigating the waters of working in museums and tweeting about what you do is very risky business. Let’s not forget that most young people are on short-term contracts and a disciplinary measure for something online could well…be the end of your already tenuous position.

In our experience floating around the museum sector, we’ve noticed that actually most museums don’t have very detailed or well thought out social media policies for their staff. It seems easier somehow to shut it down all together, and allow the Press or Marketing team to guide the institutional voice online. But come on, are we still really at that stage? Haven’t we questioning the authoritative voice of the museum enough? Allowing multiple voices to engage with the public is more welcoming, accessible, and in the end likely to bring positive attention to your museum!

On the other hand, we know it’s scary and there are very legitimate security reasons for worrying about behind the scenes staff and their online accounts. But fear not, there are plenty of museums doing fantastic work that you can look to for guidance. For the Ministry’s part, we’ve come up with a few top tips on how to have an online presence and not get fired that we’ll be sharing with everyone up on Manchester. Not to give too much away of course (I mean you are coming right??) but we’ll start you off with this to ponder:

If you are tweeting about your museum work, be sensitive to your collection. It sounds like a simple concept sure, but you’d be surprised how nuanced it is to combine museum best practice with a social media approach. If you work with human remains, well, let’s be honest talking about what you do in the day is going to be tricky (and that’s probably for the best). If you work with incredibly expensive art, you are going to need to take care to not reveal any confidential information that could compromise safety. If you work with a collection full of weird and fun scientific do-das – for the love of god tweet that all the time! Respect your collection, think before you tweet.

In case you’ve missed it, we’ve also written a short commentary piece to accompany the talk that’s out in the Museums Journal now! http://www.museumsassociation.org/museums-journal/comment/01022014-why-you-should-listen-junior-staff

Egyptian Curse or Sneaky Curator: The Mysterious Manchester Statue

At the Ministry we do our best to bring you the most important museum news as it happens. That is why we are so surprised that not more people are talking about what has been called 'the curse of the spinning statue' by the illustrious news outfit the Manchester Evening News. MEN seems to be about everywhere on the museum scene these days, when it first broke the (later proved false) account about how MOSI was on the brink of closure. Then today they published shocking footage from the Manchester Museum which appears to show an Egyptian funerary statue spinning in a case.

Check out the original story and the video here: http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/video-curse-spinning-statue-manchester-4698583

Everyone freak out! Is this finally what every museum curator ever has been waiting for: a re-animated museum object ala 'Night at the Museum'. Or do we need to get the case of the Mummy on the case to deal with this clearly haunted statue.

I think the real protagonist of the MEN's piece has to be Dr Campbell Price, the Curator of Egypt and the Sudan at the Manchester Museum. In his interview, Price blatantly rejects the more logical theory that the object if moving due to the vibrations of visitors feet. He suggest that the statue has instead been inhabited by a spirit unable to move on.

Is it a coincidence then that Dr. Campbell Price is an expert in Egyptian funerary statuary? Could it be that the statue does not revolve at night because there are no sneaky curators around to slowly move it? Whatever the case, Price is clearly milking the mystery for all it's worth to drive up summer visitor numbers to Manchester's new Ancient Worlds Gallery. (And why not? We certainly want a visit now.)

What do you think? Clever promotional stunt? Actual haunting? Poorly planned floor-loading?

Whatever the cause, the Ministry knows exactly what to do. Remember you heard it here first: stick some plastazote under it. The universal panacea.

What the frack is going on with SMG?

Having recently returned from my holiday (hey even Ministers of Curiosity need time off) there is only one question on my mind: what the frack is going on with the Science Museum Group?

It all appears to have started with an article in the Manchester Evening News claiming that the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) in Manchester was under threat from the big bosses of the Science Museum Group (SMG). MOSI has only recently joined SMG in 2011 after a round of government funding cuts. Closing one of SMGs northern museums (the Media Museum in Bradford, MOSI in Manchester and the Railway Museum in York) is just one of the options SMG is considering addressing its enormous budget deficit.

The outcry from this announcement has been enormous in the museum community. Some have pointed out that a strong North-South divide has been dredged up in the ensuing finger pointing. Why aren’t London museums closing? Why is it only the North that must suffer?

The Museums Association had a sniff around as well to see if the story that the Evening News was reporting had any legitimacy. The answer is, well yes. The statement from Science Museum Director Ian Blatchford that started all the arguments came as a response to an additional 10% proposed cut in government spending for museums, “I would rather have three world class museums than four mediocre ones.’

I think it’s probably worth pointing out that a) the Science Museum Group could well sell on one of their museums rather than closing it and b) maybe I have missed something, but why are we focusing on MOSI here? Where did anyone say the Manchester site is the one that would be closed down? To be honest, I’d be more nervous if I was the National Media Museum. MOSI has an enormous amount of community support and impressive visitor numbers. The NMeM has…well it has the lowest visitor numbers in the group and shares specialties with the core collections in London. In fact, the Science Museum planning to open not one but two galleries based around media technology: the Information Age Gallery and the ‘Media Space’ specifically meant to show off the NMeM’s collections.

Plans for Media Space at the Science Museum 

I cannot help but wonder if the announcement wasn’t actually a brilliant piece of strategy on the part of Ian Blatchford. Sure, people are now vilifying him and the big bad South Kensington museum, but he had to do something to get SMG noticed. We have now arrived at the point where spending cuts are biting not only regional museums but the nationals as well. That’s not to say the past several years haven’t been terrible for each museum in the sector, but we are starting to see real consequences for even the most established of museums.

But why is the Science Museum suffering more than its South Kensington neighbours? Probably for the same reason the Royal Institution is always under threat. Science is just not sexy to funders. You can’t possibly compare the amount of corporate funding somewhere like the National Gallery or the V&A receive to the Science Museum. And yes you can talk about mis-managing money or whether MOSI should have been brought on in the first place. But at the end of the day, there’s only one culprit here and it’s not Ian Blatchford. Maybe now the government will listen when we say you cannot cut funding to the bone and ask for ever higher performance indicators. UK museums are being brought to their knees and the façade of business as usual is starting to crack.

This is not to say we in anyway agree to the idea of closing any SMG sites- only to say that the blame lies with the relentless cuts for the arts. Something has to change. At the Ministry we love anything that gets people talking about museums but don’t waste your breath on the big bad SMG. Get out there and do something about it- sign the petitions, use the twitter hashtags (#savemosi), talk to your MPs, and visit your local museums as much as you can. I for one am happy to see SMG all over the news. Maybe people will finally start to see that something needs to be done.

Petitions to the HM Treasury can be found here:

http://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/save-the-national-media-museum-bradford

http://www.yorkpress.co.uk/indepth/savethenrm/petition/

http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/science-museum-group-save-the-museum-of-science-and-industry-mosi

If you want to read more, we would recommend this piece in the Guardian by Alice Bell and Kieron Flanagan http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/political-science/2013/jun/06/science-museum-group-manchester-london

And now we brace ourselves for a torrent of jokes at the Science Museum’s expense at the next Museums Showoff….