Tag: heritage

Heritage Heroes Award

Posted on by Amy Shakespeare

In March 2018 Cornwall Museums Partnership and SW Museum Development hosted the very first Cornwall Heritage Awards to celebrate and champion the amazing work that’s taking place in our museums.

This week we recognise the invaluable contribution made by the volunteer teams within heritage organisations across Cornwall. Without volunteers, our heritage would not be protected for everyone to enjoy, learn from or be inspired by in the future.

The judges found this a particularly difficult award to judge and wanted to express thanks and appreciation to all the entrants.

 

Joint Winner – Heritage Heroes Award (smaller organisations) Newquay Old Cornwall Society; Archaeology Group

Under the guidance of Sheila Harper this group tirelessly cares for ancient archaeological sites around the Newquay area. Never afraid of hard work, they do everything from clearance to remedial and preservation work and have brought the ancient late Saxon village at Mawgan Porth back off the English Heritage risk register. The group meet throughout the year and undertake site monitoring, provide talks and guided walks and actively encourage others in learning about and enjoying our heritage.

 

Joint Winner – Heritage Heroes Award (smaller organisations) Old Guildhall Museum and Gaol, Looe; Winter Team

The museum was left without leadership when both former curators fell ill and were facing a very difficult future. However, the volunteer team stepped forward and worked tirelessly to care for, identify, research and redisplay the artefacts. The process has enabled the volunteers to completely refresh the museum and learn a lot more about Looe’s heritage which they can share with their visitors. It hasn’t stopped there, they are now working on events and activities to encourage and build new audiences.

 

Highly Commended – Heritage Heroes Award (smaller organisations) The Castle Heritage Centre, Bude; The Castle Archive Team

The archive team at The Castle Heritage Centre are a group of skilled and dedicated volunteers who care for the collections twice a week, keeping meticulous records, recording environmental data and caring for the objects across 3 sites; The Heritage Centre, The Barge Workshop and The Old Forge. The team also support and encourage others, through the return to work schemes as well as work experience initiatives, family history research and public enquiries. It is clear that the volunteers are prepared to go above and beyond for the good of the Heritage Centre.

 

Winner – Heritage Heroes Award (larger organisations) Wheal Martyn; Historic Crane Conservation Project

Volunteers were absolutely at the heart of this conservation project from the very start through to undertaking the work. Following professional conservation advice, Peter and Ray undertook painstaking conservation, working outdoors in all weathers. It was a long and hard job, particularly given the number of pieces the crane was dismantled into. Peter and Ray were later joined by three new volunteers, Ken, Andrew and during the summer holiday Gavin, a student from St Austell College. The project has been featured as a case study in the  Association of British Transport and Engineering Museums Guidelines for the Care of Larger and Working Historic Objects.

 

Highly Commended – Heritage Heroes Award (larger organisations); Geevor Tin Mine; Muckers & Loco Restoration Group

Locos and muckers were used at Geevor to transport rocks underground and the shed where they were repaired is still in operation. Jack, John and Kevin have been enthusiastically restoring the vehicles and have spoken with people who still work in the mining industry and sought the knowledge of former miners and engineers to assist them in their work. The team have worked tirelessly to ensure the project is successful by chatting with visitors and sharing progress on Facebook. They provide an enormous contribution to Geevor and the wider story of Cornish Mining.

 

Highly Commended – Heritage Heroes Award (larger organisations); Helston Museum; Education Pod

Helston Museum Education volunteers take care of all the many school visits to the museum, everything from taking bookings to devising and delivering activities, such as their Victorian schoolroom and evacuee sessions. The team create an immersive learning experience where all participants feel as though they have travelled back in time. They are extremely hardworking and imaginative and were pivotal in enabling Helston Museum to gain a Sandford Award for Heritage Education.

 

Bryony Robins, Museum Development Officer – bryony@cornwallmuseumspartnership.org.uk

Cornwall Heritage Awards is launched

Posted on by Amy Shakespeare

Cornwall Museums Partnership (CMP) has launched the very first ‘Cornwall Heritage Awards’, which will celebrate the achievements of museums and heritage organisations across Cornwall.

The awards, which were officially launched on Tuesday 10 October, will give the opportunity to showcase the hard work of museums as well as the staff, volunteers and trustees that support them.

Applicants can enter up to seven awards, which include innovative project of the year, heritage heroes, the family friendly award, the audience initiative award, the Cornish heritage award, project on a budget, and the object of the year award, which will be subject to a public vote in the new year.

Emmie Kell, Director of Cornwall Museums Partnership encourages local museums to get involved in the new awards: “We are excited to be launching such a fantastic new initiative. The Heritage Awards have been designed to recognise and reward achievement, and raise the profile of museums and heritage organisations in Cornwall.

The Awards ceremony will also offer a great opportunity to network with colleagues and build connections with other key industry professionals. The event will be true a celebration of Cornwall’s distinctive cultural heritage.”

The application process is open until Friday 15 December 2017. Winners will be announced at the Awards Ceremony that takes place on 20 March 2018 at Scorrier House in Redruth.

For more information and to apply, please visit the Cornwall Museums Partnership website.

Weekly Tech Review – Week 6 Sketchfab – viewing 3D scans

Posted on by Amy Shakespeare

Sketchfab

Overview:

Following on from last week’s review of publishing 3D models on Sketchfab, we are reviewing the user-experience of Sketchfab. Sketchfab is a platform where you can publish, share and discover 3D content. There are over 1.5 million scenes with a community of over 1 million creators you can follow, making Sketchfab the largest platform for immersive and interactive 3D content. As with most of our reviews, this is a free platform, where there is no cost to upload or access content.

What you need:

  • An internet connection
  • A computer or smartphone
  • The Sketchfab website or app (available for iOS and Android)

 Instructions:

The Sketchfab website is incredibly easy to use and navigate. For the purposes of this review, we visited the profile of the British Museum, who have made a concerted effort to publish 3D models online, and have uploaded 220 to date. Following on from this we explored the models that were tagged as ‘Cornwall’ and then filtered for ‘Cultural Heritage and Museums’. We particularly enjoyed the 3D models created by Tom Goskar.

Pros:

  • Detailed information has been provided next to the models. We selected the Queen piece from the Lewis Chess set – this showed information relating to the date of production, height, material, as well as meta-data about the person who took the 3D scan and what equipment was used.

  • There is the facility for multiple annotations when a model contains more than one object.

  • You can download the model for free, though if you wished to charge, there is the facility. This is dependent upon copyright restrictions – so if you don’t want people to download something, you don’t have to offer it.
  • You can add this model to your own collection, embed it on a website, like it, and share it on social media.
  • You can see how many people have viewed and liked the model, allowing museums to gauge the popularity of objects.
  • There is the facility to set different licenses for the download, for instance, the Queen is Creative Common Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. The Creative Commons system of licensing is very straightforward, and you can easily work it out here.
  • People can comment on each model, allowing for extra information, feedback, and discussion amongst users.
  • You can tag each model with generic terms, making it easy for people to find your model while browsing.
  • Link to the museum’s website

Cons:

  • We were keen to try out the VR facility on the Sketchfab app with our trusty Google Cardboards, however, we noticed that all of the museum/heritage models that we looked at were not optimised for VR. This is not a criticism of Sketchfab per se, but more of a missed opportunity on behalf of museums. We did find some ‘VR ready’ models and found the experience to be absolutely brilliant, with the ability to move around the object (something that we noticed was noticeably lacking in Google Arts and Culture and Google Expeditions.
  • Viewing objects in VR version works perfectly for iOS devices. However, using an Android device takes a long time for the object to load in VR and, additionally, the user must install the Google VR Services app beforehand, in order to be able to view objects on Google cardboard (or any VR device).

General feedback:

We love Sketchfab! It presents a brilliant opportunity to freely share and disseminate 3D digital content and become a member of this burgeoning online community. We particularly like the idea of being able to comment on models and feel that this would be a useful tool in the co-curation of museum objects, enhancing digital engagement and participation.

We noticed that most of the models that have been tagged as ‘Cornwall’ are archaeological or architectural, so there is a need for museum object to comprehensively display Cornish heritage.

Score:

  • Price – 5/5
  • Ease of use- 5/5
  • Education – 5/5
  • Fun – 4.5/5

Overall score: 19.5

Jenny Lee and Yiota Liopetriti