reviewing and planning for the future

Had a really rewarding few hours together looking at how the first Collections Session went and planning for what happens next. We felt the first session was a great opportunity to bring different parts of the museum together - but it also made it clear that whilst it was good to get people from across the museum together for the project to have lasting impact and change the way the museum uses it collections we also need to plan in some more detailed sessions with individual volunteer and staff groups.

This then moved on to thinking about what we could do with the gardening collections - some blue sky thinking - it was great to think big, and then actually rather exciting to plan what we can do with the remaining time. We filled a flipchart paper with ideas - there are so many opportunities to use the collections once you begin to know them a little better. I'll upload a photo of the "brainstorm" later so you can see where our thinking was going.

We have also begun to plan out the rest of the project and it seems like everything is beginning to fall into place. We have enough time (fingers crossed) to do another joint in-house collections session (this time on objects), then a series of specialised sessions for individual groups followed finally by two workshops for the wider museums community. We are planning on working with the SHARE network to run two day workshops at Gressenhall - one on the gardening collections themselves but the second on how to use collections effectively across the diverse roles of a museum - how to get the most out of your collections.

We also thought about how to desseminate the inforamtion from our collections sessions to a wider museum audience and I am going to try and develop a "Collections Corner" informal newsletter that I can then continue to use and explore the collections with other staff members after the project has finished. The idea would be that I would briefly write up any particular part of the collections I had been working on - something I was requested by a researcher, something I was looking at for a temporary exhibition or a theme I was exploring for an event. These would build up into a library of informal guides to the collections - hopefully of use for my successor as well. We would aim to have these available on our website too to increase the amount of collections information available to our digital audiences. All very exciting...now  I just need to find the time to get on and do it!