Glasgow Museums

Earlier this week I caught the train over to Glasgow and catch up with a few museums. To an outsider, the Scottish train system appears far more efficient than what we experience in Australia. Having a much more concentrated population probably helps with this. Edinburgh and Glasgow are only about an hour apart by train and there’s a train between the two departing every 15 minutes, stopping at several key towns in between.

I was met at Glasgow Central station by Chris Jamieson from Glasgow Museums who took me out to Nitshill where Glasgow Resource Centre is located. Although a much larger complex, it reminded me very much of Mitchell in Canberra, where the National Museum, Australian War Memorial and National Archives all have their main stores. This was particularly the case when the train back to town was delayed by 40 minutes due to weather and I was standing there with a number of staff from the Museum huddling together in an attempt to stay warm!

Glasgow Museums are part of Glasgow Life, a Trust set up to manage the recreational facilities of Glasgow Council. The Glasgow Local government area covers 175 km2 and 580,000 people (1.2 million in the greater Glasgow urban area). Glasgow Museums include 8 museums, the resource centre and the open museum program. The Glasgow Museums Resource Centre was built in two stages, the first housing much of the art collections from Kelvingrove and the second taking an incredibly diverse collection from the storage area of the Transport museums (currently being redeveloped at the Riverside Museum). As well as transport and industrial material, the collection includes design, ethnographic, natural science, archaeological, social history and ancient history materials. It’s estimated that there are something close to 1 million objects in the collection and approximately 400 staff across all the Glasgow Museums sites. The storage facility id divided into a series of pods each one housing collections of like materials. The pods are housed within an overall warehouse as buildings within buildings. This system provides an additional buffer between the collection and the outside environment, somewhat like the air pocket within double glazed windows.

The Resource Centre is open for tours which are run regularly either as general interest (highlights) or focused on a particular theme. The curators within Glasgow Museums are being encouraged to develop tours based on topics of interest to them. I was told about one recent tour focused on Shakespeare which highlighted paintings taken from Shakespearean plays, collection items from the Elizabethan era (of Shakespeare's time) and material related to the topics of the plays currently on the school curriculum. Another tour focuses on taxidermy and gives visitors the chance to see the taxidermy areas of the collection. Tours for preschoolers have been developed with one tour that focused on the beach including children lying on beach towels in the store imagining they were at the beach.As well as housing Glasgow Museums collections, the facility provides office facilities for many of the Glasgow Museums staff, conservation labs, exhibition design and production workshops and a learning area.

The Resource Centre is also the home base for the Glasgow Open Museum, a project led by Chris Jamieson. The project aims to bring the museum out to people in Glasgow and uses the collection as a focus. Over a 20 year period the Glasgow Open Museum has worked with people in various parts of Glasgow including setting up within a flat in a tall Housing Commission style block of flats. This provided an opportunity to work with migrant women on a project that started by taking them to look at the Glasgow Collections and selecting objects of interest to them to develop their own art work. The Open Museum collaborates with other groups throughout Glasgow including a foundation that works with refugees who have been victims of torture, a Pakistani community centre providing day services for elderly people, the storytelling networks, and a youth group in a housing trust area.

The Glasgow Open Museum provides small travelling exhibitions to libraries, health centres and shopping centres and has permanent displays in a children's centre, a mosque, and two mini community museums. They also have a loan service where groups can borrow resources including free standing exhibitions, handling kits, Reminiscence kits and tabletop displays.

The Gardener's Ark is the outcome of a two year project with a residential group from Leverndale Hospital and is an active rehabilitation project. The Open Museum worked with hospital residents, staff and community workers to develop independent living skills with a group of adult learners. The group were interested in gardening and visited to museum to look at artworks including still life paintings. They then created their own still life settings using vegetables they had grown and objects from the collection which were then photographed by the museum photographer who assisted with settings and lighting. The learners were then interested in a painting of a herring boat from the collection, which led to the construction of a boat filled with pots of flowers. The boat has been on display at different sites around Glasgow including Leverndale Hospital, Glasgow Museums Resource Centre, the People's Palace Winter Gardens and the Hidden Gardens at Tramways. It is to have a permanent home in the grounds of Leverndale Hospital from this November.

Chat with Jane Robinson, Head of Museum Development

During my time at MGS I have been privileged to have one on one discussions with many of the staff members. Today I had a great chat with Jane Robinson, Head of Museum Development who outlined many of the projects and some of the future plans that MGS have for Museum Development.

Many of the MGS staff have been focused for the last week on the planning of an upcoming project Skills for the Future. This is an internship program that will see people with tertiary level education from a range of backgrounds undertaking internships with museums and galleries across Scotland. The program includes both workplace training and a series of one day workshops and it is hoped will be the beginning of a new generation of museum workers.

Like Australia, Scotland has recently developed a new curriculum. Interestingly, where Australia is working towards a national curriculum, Scotland is working on a curriculum somewhat different to that delivered in other areas of the UK. The curriculum is developed through Learning and Teaching Scotland and apparently puts the learner at the centre of the curriculum and has four key outcomes- confident individuals, responsible citizens, successful learners and effective contributors. MGS are using these concepts as a focus for museums where learning is seen as lifelong. LTS Scotland has developed an intranet for teachers and other educators called GLOW and museums are being encouraged to collaborate on material for this website.

MGS is working through a digital content strategy which focuses on four key areas- sharing, creating, delivering and preserving. This year they have focused on effective collection management systems for large industrial museums and website based issues for museums and galleries operating within local government. As is often the case in Australia, Scottish museums and galleries based within local government are confronted with a range of issues when developing websites or engaging with social networking. To work through some of these issues, MGS will be hosting a meeting with key local government museum and gallery representatives and local government IT staff. It will be interesting to hear of the outcomes of this meeting.

Earlier this year, Adrian Babbidge was the guest speaker at MGS's AGM. Adrian is a museum consultant who has done a lot of work with the Association of Independent Museums including a research study on Volunteering in Independent Museums. Adrian's study and the speech he gave at the AGM, Changing Times, Changing People outlined the changing face of volunteering, encouraging museums not to keep looking for volunteers like themselves but thinking outside the square. His research found that there are approximately 4 "groups" or generations over an 80 year period and provided an outline of the attitudes, character and values of these different generations and how they might approach volunteering. There is much food for thought with Adrian's work.