September 2022 Update

Hurricane Fiona Relief Funding

Is it just us or did we blink and September was gone? And what a way for it to end. If anyone needs help with recovering from Fiona, please reach out. You may also be eligible for provincial or federal funding assistance. Our friends at the Heritage Trust of Nova Scotia offer small grants to cover repairs to historic buildings. The province has launched a Disaster Financial Assistance Program to help households, businesses and non-profits. There is also some federal Emergency Assistance funding available through the Museum Assistance Program, so if your collections suffered any damage due to Fiona please contact our office and we will put you in touch with a program officer.

TRACK Updates

This month has been full of meetings and conversations and forward momentum. With so many moving parts and so much other work on the go, things have gone a bit slower than we had hoped. But we are so happy with how this new program is shaping up. We will be sharing news at the regional heritage group meetings in October and November, so be sure to come out and we'll do our best to answer all your questions.

We postponed one training opportunity because of Hurricane Fiona, so stay tuned for updates on it. If you want to learn more about the program and check out upcoming training opportunities, visit our website.

Unlocking Museum Collections Sessions

We had some amazing conversations at the M'ikmaw Native Friendship Centre session this month. And once again this session was totally unique from the seven previous ones. In order to start wrapping our heads around all of the experiences and our many, many notes, we spent a day talking and pouring over everything. This was so incredibly helpful. We discovered some trends in key messages and calls to action, and feel like we have a much better sense of how to move this work forward. We will be sharing some of this at the Interpretation Canada conference session on Monday. 

We have two remaining sessions; in Chéticamp on October 14th and Amherst on November 17th. The Amherst session has been added by request of the community and will be held in partnership with the Cumberland African Nova Scotian Association and Black Cultural Centre. 

To learn more about this work, visit our website.

CollectiveAccess Updates

September was a busy month for CollectiveAccess. We are prepping for a number of technical upgrades as part of our Unlocking Collections work. Included in this is translation work as we prepare for our first French-language user to come on board (hooray!). Our friends in New Brunswick have shared some of their bilingual resources, so if anyone wants a French user manual, let us know. We also ran a manual sync of NovaMuse this month while we await for the new sync process work to be finished.

With all the museums shifting into fall mode, database work dropped off significantly this month...a normal reflection of our seasonal activity. As this month's stats were reviewed, I couldn't help but think back to our Unlocking sessions and one of the messages we heard over and over again: "We don't know what museums have." Rather than stress about our backlogs, let's be proud of how far we've come, how much we've learned along the way, and just keep moving forward. Slowly but surely the information about our collections is getting better, stronger and richer. This month 247 new records were entered into databases, and along with them 438 associated images. This is good progress.

Educational Partnerships

In case you missed it, we welcomed someone new to the office in September. Olivia has joined us from the MSVU's Child and Youth Studies program. She's already working away on new resources for NovaMuseEd, starting first with our stockpile of files sent in previously. If you have ideas for resources or want to learn more about this work, feel free to reach out! You can read her intro blog post here.

With so many of our museums closing for the season, and schools reopening for the school year, be sure to reach out to your local teachers and schools to let them know they can access your resources online, for free, any time they want. And keep an eye on the NovaMuse Twitter and Facebook accounts for #NovaMuseEd announcements about new resources.