Archive for the 'Management' Category

SF story

Wednesday, April 11th, 2007

After the morning session on museum blogging developments, I went out for a walk to get some fresh air and a bite to eat. Bought a really nice bacon sandwich and a coffee and sat in the little park behind the Yerba Bueana Center for the Arts. It’s a beautiful warm day (rather like [...]

Sleepless in San Francisco

Wednesday, April 11th, 2007

‘Well, I’m back’, he said. And in San Francisco, in the hotel and ready for Museums and the Web 2007 (now with added me). The paper is online, the presentation is (pretty much) done, and I haven’t slept for over forty hours. I went to bed at 11.30pm on Monday (UK time), but just [...]

Now it’s your turn…

Thursday, February 8th, 2007

Another of these silly what [x] are you quizzes [via]. Apparently I am Isaac Asimov. Is that good or bad? Scarily, I do have quite a lot of his books.

I am:Isaac Asimov
One of the most prolific writers in history, on any imaginable subject. Cared little for art but created lasting and memorable tales.

Which science [...]

The quick and the deadline

Sunday, February 4th, 2007

Well, I did get may paper for Museums and the Web 2007 in on time - right on the deadline 30th January, though I had calculated that since it was being submitted to somewhere in Toronto I would theoretically have until 5am on the 31st… and at times it seemed like I might need the [...]

Papiere, bitte

Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006

My proposal for a paper for Museums & the Web 2007 has been accepted! I am overcome with excitement … coupled with a terror that I now have to write the damn thing. I don’t mind talking about it - public speaking doesn’t worry me at all - but the writing somehow terrifies me. On [...]

Comrades! Tractor production has increased for the tenth successive year…

Wednesday, November 15th, 2006

Or, Living in a Culture of Continuous Improvement

I attended a meeting today about developing a “quality assurance framework” for museums. The essential driver for this being that if we don’t develop one ourselves, we will have one imposed anyway by the Scottish Executive. As Peter Stott commented, we need yet another set of measurements and [...]

Two things

Thursday, September 14th, 2006

On another blog I was reminded of the two things meme, so here’s mine for museums:

Collections, not buildings
Access trumps conservation

Title fight

Monday, May 15th, 2006

Once upon a time I used to do really curatorial things - cataloguing collections, researching and writing exhibitions, rooting through the collections* - all the interesting things I’ve referred to elsewhere. One of the penalties of increasing management responsibility is that you end up doing less and less of what you came into museums to [...]

Sense of history

Saturday, February 11th, 2006

Right back at the beginning of this blog I wrote about the experience which more than any other led me to working in museums. Now while that fixed in my head the value, the importance, of objects as the physical link to our past, it must be admitted that very few museums will provide that [...]

Performance art

Sunday, January 8th, 2006

So we are to have a new Statutory Performance Indicator for local authority museums. We are to replace the weird “% of museums supported by the authority which have full registration” (annoyingly just at the point where we achieved 100%) with measures of visitor numbers. Now for physical visitors that could be relatively easy - [...]