January 2023 Update

Advocacy

2023 will be a year of advocacy for ANSM. Last fall, at the regional meetings we spoke with you about the need for ANSM and our members to help all levels of government better understand the benefits museums offer to our communities and how we are struggling to continue to offer these benefits in our current economic climate. A letter was written by the ANSM board to Minister Dunn, Department of Communities, Culture, Tourism, and Heritage asking for a meeting to discuss these issues.  Many of you signed this letter and shared copies with your MLAs. 

In follow-up to this meeting, on January 31, Maggie along with members of the ANSM board and museum representatives from each region of the province met with the Minister and senior staff from the Department.  It was a positive meeting.  ANSM left the meeting feeling that the Department is hearing and understanding our concerns.  They are working hard to support the museum sector. No financial commitments were made although senior staff from CCTH have already reached out to Maggie to set follow-up meetings on how the Department can better communicate with museums. These are positive steps.

In follow-up to this meeting, ANSM also submitted a letter to the Department of Finance and Treasury Board as part of the pre-budget public consultations.  This letter was sent to all 55 MLAs along with a personal note about the museums in their ridings.  We hope you, our member museums, were also able to do submissions to the pre-budget consultations.  

We know this is only the beginning of our advocacy work this year. ANSM is submitting a similar letter to the federal pre-budget public consultation and will follow-up with MPs. This letter will address important programs such as Young Canada Works and Museum Assistance Program grants. Expect to hear more about advocacy and how you can be involved in this work in the spring and summer.  In order for this to be effective, member museums will need to be involved. 

TRACK Updates

T is for Training! Save the date - April 26th we'll be in Membertou to learn more about Mi'kmaq culture and heritage. 

We are almost ready to introduce you to a new member of the ANSM team, who is joining us to tackle a project that's pretty exciting (in a geeky way). Most people know we have a wide variety of resources available on our website - sample forms, templates, policies etc. There's also a backlog of paper-based resources sitting in our office. We also have YouTube tutorials and of course of reference library of museological literature. Next week we begin the process of merging all of these resources into our reference library database for easy, online access by our members. All of these resources will be organized and aligned with TRACK, so will be a great way for us to provide support via R - Resources. Stay tuned for updates!

Last week we met with the final museum of our first round of piloting. We learned so much through discussions with these six museums. Over the next two weeks we will be taking all the notes from these pilot meetings and updating the assessment document. Then we'll be sending it off to our graphic designer for beautification. After that we'll embark on the second round of piloting. A - Assessment is moving along slowly but surely.

More Training - Collections Storage (RE-ORG)

Do you need help with your collections storage? Do you have more artifacts than space? Do you need a budget-friendly solution to these problems? The RE-ORG Method  is a step-by-step approach for small to medium-sized heritage institutions. It aims to help them reorganize their collection storage rooms and regain access to their collections for enhanced community involvement.  

Anita Price will be leading a one-day workshop for ANSM members on March 29th on the RE-ORG Method.  To register ($125) or for more information check out ANSM's webpage. 

Unlocking Collections

Naomi is picking away at Made in NS work, and we want to send a big shout out of thanks to the Dartmouth Heritage Museum for offering some books about Nova Scotian artists for us to peruse and reconcile with this database.

Our original plan was to write a digitization strategy associated with this work, but we are now calling this our ReconciliAction Plan. It is a bit broader than collections and digitization because of the scope of conversations. It is in the final draft stages now and we look forward to sharing it with everyone. It's going to be a living document that not only guides our and museums' work, but will be a living document that tracks progress and activities. 

Website Updates

We're excited to unveil a brand new feature to our website: the ANSM Job Board! We encourage members to send employment opportunities directly to Brittany at services@ansm.ns.ca. The Job Board will be able to link viewers directly to your website as well as download additional information such as a full job description. 

We look forward to receiving the influx of summer jobs to share!

CollectiveAccess Updates

We didn't share numbers last month, but here's where things sit now with all the databases:

Southwest: 159,705 records and 107,457 images

Central: 110,415 records and 116,625 images

Northeast: 64,221 records and 84,074 images

Cape Breton: 33,461 records and 26,771 images

It's exciting to see 367,000+ records and 335,000+ records in the databases. Every region has added new records and images, or edited existing records this month. This is how we eat the backlog elephant - one bite at a time, and celebrating our collective progress.

Your image lesson of the month is a repeat, but worth revisiting for two reasons. First, we want to make sure that photos like this are scanned rather than photographed with the scale. The scale and off-centre dead space around the picture frame ends up distracting the eye from the actual photograph. We want to focus on these women and the story they are telling. The other reason this photo is worth revisiting is that it is a great example of something that needs to be Unlocked. Not all of the women of the Volunteer Corps are identified, and in the back row we see Minnie Grey, a member of the African Nova Scotian community. As we heard last summer, all too often community stories are lost or hiding in collections. We want to make sure that these are Unlocked and shared. We want to explore Minnie's story and make sure that her family and friends and community can easily find her and her life experiences in collections.

Educational Partnerships

Jordyn has been very busy working with museum program files and finishing up some existing draft resources for sharing on NovaMuseEd. If you missed Jordyn's intro message, you can read it here.

We are in active talks with universities and colleges about summer internships, keeping our fingers crossed that we'll have some company for summer travels and help with Unlocking work. Wish us luck!

The Fleming project is moving fast and the students have wrapped up the first part - proofreading records. Next up, the research phase. Each student gets to pick an item to research and enrich. This is always interesting because something new is dug up. One year we learned about a shipwreck, another year we learned about clothing dyes...we always learn something.

That's all for now. Stay tuned for more news soon!