November 2020 Update

Museum Studies Program
As amazing as it seems, we are now halfway through the Management & Governance course with Virginia Stephen. Thanks to everyone who has embraced online learning with us this year. While we've dipped our toes in it before, it feels like we got thrown into the pool this year. And your response to jump in the pool with us is appreciated...sincerely. We don't know what next year will bring, but we've enjoyed meeting new friends online this year, and hope that you'll all stay tuned for next year's MSP course offerings. 

Museum Evaluation Program
What a busy month! After the orientation refresher (if you missed it, feel free to email me and ask for the recording), we had a big increase in questions and Doc Review submissions. This is so great! It's also a little overwhelming, so bear with me as I wade through the backlog. I promise you will get feedback as soon as possible. The MEPWG also held a meeting this month. It was a very focused discussion and as always, the group was very engaged. 
We also had the 7th webinar in our MEP Deep Dive series, looking at the Marketing & Revenue Generation section. Now that we've worked our way through the 7 sections of the evaluation we'll be branching out and talking about other issues. First up is Accreditation on December 11th at 130pm. What is it? How does it work? Who's eligible? If you're interested in learning more about accreditation, you won't want to miss out. If you haven't registered yet, click here. And if you want to access the recordings of previous Deep Dives, let me know.

CollectiveAccess Updates
It's been a busy month for database work, with the migration of a new member museum into CollectiveAccess and the remaining images from summer digitization training sessions being added. And that's just the work that we've done. 6,263 new records and 3,709 new images were attached in November. This is the 6th month in a row that more than 3,500 new images were added to CollectiveAccess. Wow. I know that COVID has enabled us to do some extra behind-the-scenes work, but I think we need to stop for a minute and recognize what an enormous accomplishment this is, both for the individual museums and collectively as a whole.   

Here's the regional breakdown:
Southwest: 141,717 artifacts, 93,572
Central: 104,047 artifacts, 81,095 images
Northeast: 47,228 artifacts, 60,153 images
Cape Breton: 31,235 artifacts, 20,048 images

Congrats to the Northeast region for adding the most new records this month, and to the Central region for adding the most images!

As I've been mentioning, please keep your eyes on the new information and images being added. We want you to be presented in the best possible light and that's why quality control measures are so important. Your image lesson of the month is going to be another repeat, because unfortunately we need it again. When you are dealing with books, don't use the scale and camera. Instead you want to pop the book in your scanner to get a nice, tight image. Think about online book retailers and the crisp-looking book covers they use to advertise. That's what we are going for here. If this were a 3-dimensional object, I would have a couple other recommendations as well. The scale needs to be in the same place for all your shots, and we recommend the bottom left corner. You also want it to tuck nicely and at equi-distant along the edge of the object, sort of like a hug. Another improvement could be made with the background. Notice the edge of the table? Suddenly we go from a nice white background to a dark brownish background at the right and bottom...very distracting to the eye. You want to keep your background consistent, and use a contrasting colour to the object. So let's try to keep this in mind. Books are great for digitizing because they're so easy...so long as you use your scanner. I look forward to seeing this one redone with the scanner so that we can really focus on the artwork and give it the attention it deserves.

NovaMuseEd
It's live! Thanks to all the museums who have stepped up to develop and share resources for Nova Scotian educators. We launched NovaMuseEd with an amazing 87 resources, varying from colouring pages to word puzzles to activity books, not to mention the learning activities that our MSVU interns have been working on with museums since the summer. Teachers are already testing them out and feedback is really positive. And just because it's live doesn't mean we've stopped working on it. We still have a stockpile of drafts and ideas and will continue to work on these as time and resources allow. So what's next? How can your museum use this new tool? Contact your local teachers and let them know it's available! Highlight your contributions, and have some conversations about the needs at your local schools. And have a look through your educational programs, past and present, to see what else you might be able to share on the site. We went back to our old QR code project files and found that we had oodles of videos that can be shared - and audio/video content was #3 in the list of teacher requests. If you have some ideas or questions or just want to talk about possibilities, send us an email or give us a call and we'd be happy to chat with you.
Huge thanks to the Museums Assistance Program for supporting us in this work. 

Educational Partnerships
As hard as it is to believe, tomorrow is Cheryl's last day of her MSVU placement. The past 3 months have just flown by. And we have some really great news. Since she's enjoyed herself so much, she's staying on as a volunteer! That's right, she'll be continuing with her work on NovaMuseEd and helping museums to develop learning activities for teachers. So if you thought you missed the boat, you can still get on board! As I mentioned above, we have quite the stockpile of things to work on, but don't let that stop you from reaching out. We'd be happy to include you.

We are also active with some other partnerships right now. We are preparing to welcome our winter intern from Algonquin College, who is ready and eager to join us in January. And last week I circulated a summer internship proposal to several museum studies schools. Summer feels so far away right now, and yet these students will be making their plans early in the new year. As ever, we have a whole range of interesting projects they could work on, so we're keeping our fingers crossed that someone is interested in joining us. 

And finally, I am preparing for our annual Fleming College project, where students adopt database records, review them, and see if they can dig up a bit more contextual information about our collections. Since the class is smaller than usual this year we will only be partnering with 7 museums, so please keep your eye on your inbox for a message. If you're next in the list, I've already emailed you and it would be great to have everything prepped before the holidays.

Keeping Fresh
This month was no exception in my goal to keep things fresh with continuous learning. In addition to sitting in on our museum studies program courses - Museums & Community and Governance & Management, I participated in Blue Avocado's A Primer on Financial Audits for Non-Profits. Even though it was US-based so talked about forms and requirements that are different from Canada, it had some great suggestions and ideas. And it was nice to learn about something a bit different from my usual range of topics.