Conversing about 'Citizen Curators' - Core Session 4

Introduction

In what's been a total opposite of my feelings before the last session, time has really flown by this time between sessions. Aside from being kept busy with my volunteering, I've been ploughing ahead with my first draft of my AMA CPD Plan, with the second draft deadline early January. Naturally I'm trying to factor some of the Citizen Curators course into the CPD Plan which isn't as easy as I expected. I also attended an Ethics session since my last blog post, which I have written about but not posted ... yet.

Once again, as per my previous blog posts on Citizen Curator Core Sessions, these are my own thoughts and views from the day, thus they aren't comprehensive or definitive representations of what was covered and discussed. 

Citizen Curator Core Session 4 – Curators in the Community.

It's back to home base for me this time around, as we were situated at Penlee Art Gallery & Museum in the rather unique former cart shed outer building. Luckily there are heaters in this somewhat shell of a structure as well as the world's slowest cold water tap when it comes to filling the kettle. There were also less of us, for various reasons I didn't fully grasp, which made it somewhat cosy, especially as I was the only male this time. 

Things started off with the usual reminders - a task that is very useful for my rubbish brain function as I often need pointers to help jog the memory into action. Oh, coffee helps too, but pokes and prods really do jumpstart my brain into optimal functionality. We had a rather fun "Fill in the gaps" shout-out-the-answer task at the start to go through the Citizen Curators Values and Conventions. I could remember most of them thanks to the visual clues, of which the most important is to be an observer and to think critically. Thankfully for me, those conventions come naturally; I'm never afraid to ruffle feathers.

Thinking ahead to the upcoming group project, we were reminded to think a little about any training requirements one might require, who our digital colleague is (of which none of us were familiar with the Penlee one) and to arrange a meeting with Tehmina to go through the first high level project plan; this we have scheduled for next week.

There was an opportunity to do some verbal reflections of experiences since the last session. Naturally I drew a total blank in my brain; recall being a very weak component of my brain structure. Thankfully there were other people with much better memories than me, and we nattered about their thoughts on troubles in a local Cornish music group and their participation in the 'Empowering Women in Cornwall' Facebook group. It's always interesting to hear others views and thoughts on issues and how they've made some sense of those experiences.

This session, as with all sessions, has a quotation based around the session's theme, with this week's being connecting with communities and the social and economic barriers as well as preconceptions of museums. The cost of entry to museums is a barrier to many with the cost varying quite wildly. Solutions, such as free days or free entry with an emphasis on donations, is one way to get people in. We discussed how single-parents and unprivileged might find it harder to visit, not least the logistics but also costs: family tickets are usually for the classic 2.4 children families. We also talked about more staff training for dealing with disabilities, so they can recognise not just the obvious visual disabilities visitors might have but the unseen ones. Personally, I find staff are often trained but when it comes to putting things into practise, it's almost as if they never had the training. Perhaps more real-world training or on-going training is needed because there's nothing like real practise to really help people learn.

Diversity

Diversity was heavily brought up. One needs to create as many ways in to museums as possible and remove obstacles. It's not just the obvious here either such as the workforce and governance, but diversity is needed across many areas. What types of collection are on display? Do they represent the audience? Who visits? Just schools? Or are there just exhibitions? One needs to look at profiling the groups who visit and finding out who they are and then working out who isn't visiting. One needs to think 'Beyond the legal' - for example, transport isn't a protected characteristic in law, but can museums help provide transport for certain groups who aren't able to visit?

Cornwall

We had a discussion on Cornish recognition, of which I am a born and bred Cornishman. No no no, it wasn't a discussion about me but our minority status, much like the Welsh, for we have our own distinctiveness in customs, traditions and sports etc. Most of our museums are highly kitted out for tourism, especially as 70% of visits are by tourists but what about the locals? Most museums closed out of season. There's also a lot of deprived areas in our county. Is enough done to help the locals by museums? There are special reductions and/or passes for locals at some museums, but do enough know about it?

Knowing your museum's communities

There are numerous ways to find out about who visits your museum, from the obvious forms of physical and online surveys, to playing more attention to comments left in visitor books and comment cards. Some places are better than others at reading those and making any actions based on the feedback they get. Talking to people and finding out why they don't visit, watching and observing those who do visit, looking at TripAdvisor and Google reviews - all various ways of getting data. I myself have been looking at the Google Analytics of where I volunteer's website. There's a wealth of information there. Perhaps too much information but it can tell you how many visits you get, what days/hours, what pages are being visited, for how long, if people return to visit your site and demographics. I did report back on the information I obtained from the analytics, which did make for interesting listening although I am still unsure what difference that data made to anyone's general thoughts.

Access

We looked at access to museums which includes physical issues but also the more invisible ones such as dyslexia and most mental health illnesses. Surprisingly, 1 in 5 museum websites don't provide access information, which, along with how to get to somewhere, you'd think would be right up there with the obvious things to provide information about. This led into the afternoon's group task, in which our group looked at a specific area of the museum and the kinds of included and excluded groups that area catered for. Homing in on Gallery 5 of Penlee Museum, which is upstairs and a reasonable large room, it clearly caters for art lovers, especially those who loved local art, as that's the primary function of that gallery. There was also work from local adults and children. Who did it not cater for? Well, we didn't think there were a lot of options for parents who work the standard 9-5 job to get access into the museum, the lift had a weight limit and excluded those confined to mobility scooters. The solution to these problems were not easily solvable with the latter already having been looked at by the museum and would require extensive work. As for the former issue, we figured a series of after closing time events, for children, parents, or the elderly would help to fill in some gaps for excluded audiences.