Museum from Home


Eclectic and fun day from the BBC highlighting the work of museums and galleries through live streams and an interactive website.

Dan Vo and Sacha Coward, freelance curators, lead the day via a series of live streams where they talk to museum staff and cultural commentators about what galleries and museums are doing during lock down from checking items in store to creating online material and running archive projects to collect stories and objects from this time. They define galleries, libraries, archives and museums as the GLAM sector and, as a librarian, I am happy to be part of that!

The written live feed includes links to some fascinating videos on exhibitions which were on when lockdown made by the BBC started including “London Calling: The Clash” at the Museum of London and “Art Deco by the Sea” from Norwich. Also, great pointers to short pieces on museum websites about their exhibitions and fun content they are putting out. I am spending some time during the day following up these leads.  

As well as being stuffed full of ideas and information the day is a great tool to promote this sector and to try to break down barriers for when life reopens. Hopefully many who have used the virtual content during lockdown will feel they want to see the real thing once they can and not feel it is something other people do. It is also a chance for these organisations to highlight the effect of shut down on their cash flow and to emphasis that without help they may not exist when we reopen. My only query to this is whether the people they want to reach will be watching this feed or is it only motivated geeks like me.

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