Scottish Storytelling Centre

The John Knox House mentioned in a previous blog is located adjacent to the Scottish Storytelling Centre, a wonderful light and airy contemporary space nestled within the ancient buildings of Edinburgh's Royal Mile. The Centre opened in 2006 and provides a space for both storytellers and those who want to develop storytelling skills. I was drawn in by a chair positioned by the large window at the far in of the main space- it was an Orkney chair, a hand made chair from the Orkney Islands, where my father was born.

The main space is a large flexible room with a vaulted ceiling and a long wall that is used for small temporary exhibitions. An ingenious movable wall is filled with small vignettes that display a range of stories for all ages from William Wallace (Braveheart) to the Grufallo. Small doors reveal some of the vignettes whilst in other areas children are invited to explore inside and discover small puppets from stories such as Hairy Mclarey. When pulled out, the wall allows a small intimate storytelling space to nestle behind it, with a large chair for the storyteller to sit in and a box of dress up clothes to play with. When the wall is pushed back in the space opens up for larger events.

The Centre houses a wonderful cafe that is open to the main space and looks out over the Royal Mile (I can recommend the apple pie) adjacent to this is a wonderful bookshop with a range of books focusing on stories for all ages.

At present there is an international storytelling festival being held at the centre which this year has an eastern focus with storytellers from China, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and India. The adjacent exhibition are a series of painted scrolls by Gurupada Chitrakar- a master stoyteller from Bengal whose paintings illustrate the song lyrics of Patua storytellers including some more contemporary stories about Scots who have come to Bengal.

An Introduction to Oral History

Today I sat in on one of Museums Galleries Scotland's workforce training events- An Introduction to Oral History. MGS run a workshop about once a month, each one focusing on a single issue. This workshop had twelve participants and was delivered by Dr Gary West, University of Edinburgh- it gave a great outline of what's involved in undertaking oral history projects. Gary ran through the planning, interview and management phases of the project and then showed us the sort of equipment that's now being used for oral history interviews.

As in Australia, solid state recorders are now the most commonly used recorders. He showed us the ZOOM H4N which has two microphones in built and the capacity for a further two external mics to be attached. These recorders take SD cards and utilise about 2 GB of memory for an hour's recording. He recommends recordings are done in .wav files (not MP3) 44.1 kHz 16 bit or 48kHz 16 bit format. At the School of Scottish Studies, where Gary is based, they store master copies of the recordings they undertake on large hard drives with further masters burned as files onto DVDs. As is the case in Australia, there is still no certainty about the longevity of storage systems for digital files.

In the afternoon, the participants were given the opportunity to test out the equipment and their interviewing skills by interviewing each other. Finally Gary showed us some material from the School of Scottish Studies digitisation project Tobar an Duachailis. This is an incredible website that provides access to the School of Scottish Studies vast archive of oral histories, music recordings and songs that go back to the 1950s. The site is still in test mode but is well worth a visit.

Museums Galleries Scotland

Well I've now had two full days in the offices of Museums Galleries Scotland and what a whirlwind it's been. I was asked to provide a brief talk to the staff about M&G NSW and the museums and galleries of NSW for the second morning so I had a very busy night pulling together something that gave an impression of us and the NSW museum and gallery scene- in 15 minutes! I'm not sure I fully did us justice but people were telling me all afternoon how interesting it was so I guess there was something there.

In putting together the talk I realised how much larger NSW is than Scotland. This is particularly striking when you consider that M&G NSW has about half the staff of Museums Galleries Scotland. MGS offer many of the same services that M&G NSW do, with the major difference being that MGS don't tour exhibitions.

MGS have a really strong interest in research which became focused a few years ago through the development of a research strategy. Following the development of the strategy MGS commissioned a study on the impact of museums on communities as a broad sweep study of this area. This study then led to two further studies undertaken in 2009- Volunteering in Museums and Cornerstones of Communities. What has been great about this research is the manner in which MGS has been able to use it to back up further work such as a wonderful glossy document written to promote the work of museums with Stakeholders also called Cornerstones of Communities and the document that promotes to government he role museums play within communities called How Museums Can Help You

The latest Saatchi exhibition- Newspeak, British Art Now opened in London last night and British Art- Show 7 is on in Nottingham. There's a bit of discussion going on about which is more representative of contemporary art in the UK today. Newspeak doesn't include any audiovisual works, presumably because these are not within the collecting interests of Saatchi which has led people to ask- is it better to have an exhibition of one man's collection or an exhibition curated by outside curators (as is the case with Show 7)? It would seem that this is also an opportunity to debate the strength of the arts in the north and south of the country.


Today I'm attending one of Museums Galleries Scotland's one day workshops, this one is focused on oral history and is being run for the second time this year as it filled up (18 people) when it was held at the beginning of the year. I'll be particularly interested to see what sort of equipment and storage methods are being used over here, as well as how people are using oral history in their museums.