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. 

Introducing Olivia!

Hello everyone! I’m Olivia LaPierre and I’m currently in my fourth year of the Child and Youth studies program at Mount Saint Vincent University. I’ve done three practicum placements previously, however all three were in classroom environments, so I’m beyond excited to try something new. Planning and creating are two of my strongest suits, especially designing activities for children. I also visited a few of the province’s many museums as a child, mainly the Acadian House Museum in Chezzetcook (I have family roots there), Pier 21 on class field trips, and the Fundy Geological Museum, as I’ve always loved rocks, crystals and fossils. I’m very excited to learn more about these places, as well as some of the other museums in the province. I think it will be an amazing experience to create activities in museums that will help children learn and engage with the rich history museums have to offer. 

Outside of school, I love doing any type of arts or crafts, as well as hanging out with my pets. I’ve also worked with children since I was fifteen years old, but recently left the field to work part-time at a pet store, while in school. As much as I love working with children, it was flexible hours-wise while I’m still in school, I have a huge passion for animals as well! I’m also working part-time at school in the curriculum resource center, helping my peers do research, find books, and managing the library. 

Thank you so much to ANSM for having me here to do my last practicum, and I’m beyond excited to get started working with everyone!

Come Along with Me - Cape Breton Trip with Summer Intern Madeline

A few weeks ago, I was given the opportunity to travel to Cape Breton for two of the Unlocking Community Museum Collections community sessions; one in Membertou and one in Iona. I was also able to tag along with Brittany on several advisory site visits. 

LeNoir Forge Museum

It was great to meet and chat with so many lovely people during the advisory visits. We learned about the local history of Guysborough at the Old Court House Museum, explored the interactive exhibits at Old Sydney Society, took a ride on the virtual mine experience at the Cape Breton Miners Museum, and enjoyed the stunning scenery at LeNoir Forge Museum. During these visits, we were also able to have some great conversations about CollectiveAccess and share digitization tips and tricks with museums. We were especially impressed with the great database work that some summer students have been doing and their enthusiasm for learning more about CollectiveAccess! 

The community sessions built upon the information gathered at the previous two sessions, but also opened up some interesting and important new areas of discussion that will help inform the future of the project.

Sydney Waterfront

We finished our trip with many fun new memories and lots to think about. Driving back to Halifax, taking in the beautiful scenery of summer in Nova Scotia, I thought about how my time at ANSM is quickly coming to an end. I am so grateful for all of the incredible opportunities and experiences that I have gained during my time here and I want to thank everyone that I have met for being so friendly and welcoming. I look forward to visiting more museums across the province in the future and maybe even crossing paths with some of you again! 

- Madeline

August 2022 Update

TRACK Updates

August saw the TRACK working group meet and discuss the program developments to date. The assessment document is being released next week to pilot sites, and we are looking forward to several fall training opportunities. To learn more about these and to register, visit our website.

Unlocking Museums Collections Sessions

We've had three more community sessions this month and continue to learn A LOT as we sit together and listen to community members. As with the previous sessions, Millbrook, Cherry Brook and Antigonish were each unique but we came away feeling like this relational, conversational path is the clear way forward. We are so inspired by the openness and honesty of this work; of the communities we are meeting with and the desire of new friends to go down this path together. 

As you can imagine, the pages and pages of notes that we mentioned in last month's update have grown substantially. We are still processing and pondering, and we're not done yet! We still have more sessions to go, one of which will be held during the Interpretation Canada conference. This one will be a sort of recap of what we've done and learned so far. It will be held on October 3rd in the afternoon. If you're interested in attending, let us know.

To learn more about this work and upcoming sessions, visit our website.

CollectiveAccess Updates

We've been getting a lot of questions about the databases synchronizing with NovaMuse, and I'm very pleased to report that we're about to push "go" on the new sync. Everything is now set up and next week we will start working our way through all the databases, one by one. As you can imagine this will take some time since there are more than 50, but that's okay. We're finally making this important switch and improvement. 

Almost every museum was busy in their database this month, adding and editing records and images. There are now 359,960 records and 332,076 associated images and media files. Regionally, here's the breakdown: 
Southwest: 154,556 records and 109,395 images
Central: 109,519 records and 113,252 images
Northeast: 62,424 records and 82,658 images
Cape Breton: 33,461 records and 26,851 images

Your image lesson of the month is a bit of a funny one. We've been talking a lot during our community

sessions about the importance of taking our time and getting high quality images of items; that this is a way to respect the community of origin as well as the object itself. There is always general agreement on this, as well as recognition that previous photographers and digitization technicians may not have taken this approach. Lately we have noticed a particular kind of these older images, where it seems that people were trying to get as many items photographed as quickly as possible. So rather than photographing each item individually, group photos of exhibit spaces and storage shelves were taken. As you can tell from this example, that makes it very hard to focus on the desired object. So as you are looking through your database and digitization needs, keep an eye our for images like this. Then you can go and find those objects, photograph them on their own and give them the respect they deserve.

Educational Partnerships

We said goodbye to Emma and Madeline this month, and the SMU students wrapped up their coursework, so it feels quite different around ANSM these days. We'll be meeting with our SMU partners to debrief and discuss next steps, and are also speaking with other educational institutions about opportunities for their students. We are also looking forward to being actively involved in the social studied teachers association conference this fall, where we will be promoting museums and NovaMuse and especially NovaMuseEd.

Keep your eye out for some blog posts from our interns and students in the coming months. They left us with a lot so we've prescheduled them...the gift that keeps giving.