The Project

Museums Luton delivers museum services for Luton Borough Council as part of Luton Cultural Services Trust. It is also one of the four museum services that make up the Eastern Region Hub (with Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service, The Fitzwilliam Museum and Colchester and Ipswich Museums Service). The Hub receives significant additional funding from Government through the Renaissance in the Regions initiative. A key target for the funding is increasing and improving services to schools.

Museums Luton has a successful schools programme, however the majority of school visits are from the primary sector and it was looking to expand its work with secondary schools. In common with many other museums, while there is huge scope for using collections to tie into the secondary curriculum there are practical difficulties around secondary schools accessing museums’ resources with their students, including the fact that the museum does not have the physical capacity for a whole year group at once.

Delivering content via videoconference was seen as a way of circumventing these difficulties and allowing much larger numbers of secondary school students to access museum resources.

What next?

The next for this phase of the project is to offer these two VC sessions as part of our main programme to a national audience. During the next two academic years we will also be looking to develop our work with the secondary sector still further and hope that new content for delivery via conference will develop.

It is also hoped that the technology can be used with adult groups. Museums Luton has internationally significant hat industry and bobbin lace collections. Eleanor Markland hopes to work with Veronica Main, the textiles curator, to help her use the technology to reach an international audience.

Continued funding has meant that we can continue to innovate. The second phase of the project was focused on assisting non-hub museums in our region to access videoconference technology. The biggest barrier to museums exploiting video-conferencing has to be the initial set up costs. Therefore we purchased a second set of conferencing equipment that we loan to museums as ‘seed corn’, so they are able to develop content and demonstrate tangible success to funders and managers.

Our first partnership was with North Hertfordshire Museums Service who have successfully developed and piloted content.

Acknowledgements

The expertise and patient and practical support of Tim Arnold and Devon Media Education Centre has been crucial to the success of this project. Through them we were also able to draw on the experience of the staff at Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum. Being able to talk to fellow museum education professionals about the differences needed when developing content for videoconference was a great starting point for us. The support of Tim Jeffs, Luton Borough Council’s I.M. Networks & Communications Manager was vital, as was the enthusiasm of Ian Post and Vicky Shearman, the re-enactors who developed the characters that bring the sessions to life.

Thanks also to Terry Sayers, his team, Jo Tulla and Y9 at Icknield High School in Luton who took part in the pilot sessions and to Joe Wilkinson from Biddenham Upper School in Bedford for his input and interest that for technical reasons can’t as yet be taken further.