Welcome to the first of our new Monday morning blog posts for our museum colleagues. The past few months have been such a challenging time for the museum sector as we try to navigate the current situation and plan for the future but there have certainly been some successes that are worth celebrating.
In this series of posts we plan to highlight examples showcasing what museums have achieved in difficult circumstances. Our first entry comes courtesy of Kim Fisher, from the Visitor Services team at the Victoria Gallery & Museum in Liverpool:
When lockdown first began I wasn’t entirely sure what my job role as a member of the Visitor Services Team would entail while working from home but within the first few weeks I discovered that making crafts based on our collections and filming the ‘How To’ stage was a great way to reach out to people of all ages online.
I added a brand new section to our website for families and for adults to learn new crafts and skills ranging from clay fairy houses and photography tutorials for the adults to stop motion animation and Ancient Egyptian bead necklaces for the kids. Our recycled bird feeder even got a retweet from Kirstie Allsopp after her tv show ‘Keep Crafting and Carry On’ and brought a lot of new people to our YouTube Channel.
It’s also been lovely working with our amazing volunteers to create short tour videos and we’ve come up with new ways for them to engage with us such as filming, script writing and creating a brand new comic strip based on archival photographs.
Lockdown has also enabled me to work with some amazing musicians and collaborate using artwork in the VG&M collection to produce audio-visual pieces that we haven’t been able to produce before. One heartening comment after one of our hugely successful LightNight videos was: “Enchanting, informative and so sensitively put together…An oasis of calm amongst the turmoil of Covid, so enormous thanks for bringing this lovely piece to brighten and soothe my day.”
The whole of lockdown has taught me to be resilient and to try new things. Lockdown has enabled me to be more creative and develop new skills that I hadn’t had the time to learn beforehand and for that, I am grateful. The main thing in a period of uncertainty is to try your best and hope that what you are doing is bringing some form of positivity to your audience.
Kim Fisher,
Visitor Services, Victoria Gallery and Museum
If you’d like your museum featured in this Success in Lockdown series, please email Abdullah Ahmad, Abdullah.ahmad@manchester.ac.uk, with a short piece (max 350 words) explaining what success you are celebrating, including any top tips you have, and any accompanying images, logos or links.
Museum Development North West 
Thank you for this.
Sue Fox, Maryport Maritime Museum
On Mon, 6 Jul 2020 at 13:28, Museum Development North West wrote:
> museumdevelopmentnorthwest posted: “Welcome to the first of our new Monday > morning blog posts for our museum colleagues. The past few months have been > such a challenging time for the museum sector as we try to navigate the > current situation and plan for the future but there have certainly b” >