So many of my interests are aligning this week on Twitter.
fer and gingko fossils photo source : Lorie Pierce
@NatlFossilDay
#CephalopodAwarenessDay
#cuttlefish
@EarthSciWeek
Plus the standby #trilobitetuesday and #FossilFriday.
There are not enough 140 character increments in each day!
Twitter stat database – click to enlarge
Through analysis of the reports Twitter has been sending me, I have been able to determine my most viewed and linked-to tweet. It’s the photo of the Great Auk mount that is housed in the museum’s Biodiversity Gallery.
Great Auk mount photo source : ROM Images
Views = 2332
Links = 44
Not bad for a bird that has been extinct since the mid 1800’s.
Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson photo source : Reuters
“A business is simply an idea to make other people’s lives better.”
“When I started Virgin from a basement in west London, there was no great plan or strategy. I didn’t set out to build a business empire … For me, building a business is all about doing something to be proud of, bringing talented people together and creating something that’s going to make a real difference to other people’s lives.”
“This may sound like a truism … But it has to be said: It takes an engaged, motivated, and committed workforce to deliver a first-class product or service and build a successful, sustainable enterprise.”
“If you look for the best in your employees, they’ll flourish. If you criticize or look for the worst, they’ll shrivel up. We all need lots of watering.”
“The Virgin brand is not a product like Coca-Cola or Famous Grouse whisky; it’s an attitude and a way of life to many. That attitude is about giving customers a better time and better value in a fun way that embraces life and seeks to give the customers something new.”
Museums serve many purposes in society but ultimately they are businesses.
Are there some thoughts that come to your mind regarding your museum when you read these quotes?
Since getting an iPhone, I have been investigating worthwhile apps to download and use. Pic Stitch was recommended in a newspaper article so I downloaded a free version from the App store. And I’ve been fooling around with it ever since.
Pic Stitch gives dozens of formats for the user to combine and frame different photos. I especially enjoy using it for images to accompany tweets – the combination of pictures often explains more thoroughly what I am trying to get across.
And it allowed me to get both creative and silly. Hence, the creation of #CatVisitsMuseum. I have a particularly photogenic cat named Twinkle who has never visited the museum I work at. However, her alter-ego is having many small adventures in the galleries. (they have to be short so as not to interfere with her naps)
What a face – no wonder they call him Triceratops Horridus photo source : Lorie Pierce
Even without muscles, that Komodo Dragon is scary photo source : Lorie Pierce
Dreaming of marshmallows. What do you mean it’s a rock? cat and gogotte sandstone concretion photo source : Lorie Pierce
the circle of life – birdies, fish, resting, repeat – cat and penguin, fossil fish photo source : Lorie Pierce
The juxtaposition of images allows for a humourous approach to museum collections. Perhaps cats have been overdone in terms of cute messages. However, I personally feel that #CatVisitsMuseum has great potential.
It’s new and it’s coming your way.
3D printing is a new creative tool and I recently took an introductory course in its use.
3D printer photo source : Lorie Pierce
Files needed for these printers (eg. STD format) can be downloaded from web sources or created from objects by using a 3D scanner.
3D scanner photo source : Lorie Pierce
spool of plastic for printing photo source : Lorie Pierce
3D objects printed photo source : Lorie Pierce
This will be a great tool to make reproductions and touchables of museum artifacts.
A meme is “an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.” A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. wikipedia
It’s fortuitous that our museum’s initials rhyme with the word ‘calm’ – albeit with a bit of poetic license. Now we are on the meme bandwagon.
Chief Curator, Mark Engstrom photo source : Lucas Oleniuk
Adapted from an article in The Toronto Star online newspaper. By: Murray Whyte Visual arts, Published on Fri Apr 11 2014
ROM chief curator Mark Engstrom is overseeing the massive task of putting all of the millions of objects in the museum’s collection online.
The Royal Ontario Museum is home to some six million objects, ranging from dinosaur bones to Roman sculpture to dessicated bat wings to very specific species of high-altitude mouse from Central America. How do you manage something so huge and so broad? Not easily.
Q: Of that six million, I’m told, about five million are bits and pieces of animals…..
A: That’s right. The majority of those are the research collections, and they’re incredibly important in terms of documenting organisms at a particular place and point in time. For example, all the hard data we have on the movements of animals due to global warming . . . all the actual evidence sits in those drawers. Now the challenge is to get all that data online so people can use it worldwide.
Q: What does that data tell you?
A: Well, in the most general sense, it tells you how much has changed in a relatively short time geologically. Remember, in Toronto, it wasn’t that long ago we were under a kilometre of ice. We’re really in a biological rebound and things are gradually making their way north. The mammal fauna of Toronto, over the last 10,000 years, but particularly the last 300, it’s quite remarkable how much has changed……
Q: The ROM, as a building, is huge. Can you give us an idea of how much of your holdings are actually there for the public to see?
A: There’s probably 30,000 objects on display and it looks like a lot. But there’s six million in the back and that’s a conservative estimate. We’re a research museum, so not a lot of that is eminently displayable. But a lot of it is.
Q: One of the big efforts at the ROM is to gather up all your collections and all the data surrounding them into a single, easy-access database. How far along are you?
A: Well, we talk about six million objects, about a million of which are cultural artifacts. But as I said, that’s conservative. If you go to the invertebrate paleontology collection, the invertebrate fossils are on slabs and there may be 1,000 on a slab. We typically count the slab as one.
The museum used to be composed of 19 departments and 22 major collection areas. And each one of those had its own database. Because they were all doing their own thing and came into the computer age at different times with different angles, they developed their own databases.
We’re now migrating all of that to a universal database that covers the whole museum. And, yes, that takes time. It’s a huge project for us. Right now we have 5,000 images online and I’d like to see two to three million, and soon. The question is, how do we get from here to there? ……
It’s very important to us that people understand what a treasure house this is and how important, nationally and internationally. And no better way than to see for themselves.
badges photo source : http://souvenirs.museum140.com/gallery/badges
This interesting online initiative requests museum visitors to share their favourite souvenirs………
The Museum of Museum Souvenirs is an online crowdsourced collection, where these souvenirs can all find a home. If you have any museum souvenirs sitting at home, we’d love to add them to the collection. Don’t worry though, the originals remain with you, we just need photographs.
As well as souvenirs bought in museum gift shops, we also accept souvenirs that you made at a museum, e.g. at an event or workshop, a museum souvenir that someone brought you back as a gift, or other kinds of souvenirs that are a memento of a museum experience.
Looking back on my museum visits, I try to think of what I would share.
I purchase a memento of each major temporary exhibit. Chinese coins, a Giganotosaurus model, posters, reproductions of cuneiform writing on a tablet. I enjoy scouring the gift shops of museums and art galleries, looking for a unique gift to myself that will remind me of my visit for years to come.
Out of the blue, I got an e-mail from Twitter giving me a review of activity on my account over the last week. I had no idea there was so much going on, except that I now have 66 people/institutions following me @CreativeLorie
These Tweets helped you make connections, got people excited, and started your friends talking.
6,171 – Total Views
27 – Retweets
33 – Link Visits
Favourite posts all involved photos of dinosaurs. They are one of the biggest draws to our museum. Including this Ankylosaur skull cap displayed at our recent March Break event.
ankylosaur skull cap photo source : Lorie Pierce
In case you are wondering if that is an illustration of a Stegosaurus in the upper left. Yes, it is. We were also showing a femur (upper leg bone) from that dinosaur.
Organized by Mar Dixon and Culture Themes in collaboration with Twitter, #MuseumWeek is a chance for museums around the world to gather together, share thematic content an urge people to get involved. Mar says, “Every day of the year museums and cultural institutions across the world are using Twitter in exciting and interesting ways to tell the stories of their collections to new audiences.” #MuseumWeek will shine a light on these activities, giving a real-time glimpse into the workings of museums.
March 24 Day 1 – A day in the life (#DayInTheLife)
• We will highlight a few members of staff to give you insight into a typical day
March 25 Day 2 – Test your knowledge (#MuseumMastermind)
• We’ll ask questions, propose riddles, and create quizzes (1 per hour). For example: Where is this object from, which species is shown here, date this object, what year was this painted?
March 26 Day 3 – Your story (#MuseumMemories)
March 27 Day 4 – Buildings behind the art (#BehindTheArt)
• We’ll share facts, trivia, historic images, anecdotes from the museum’s history
March 28 Day 5 – Ask the expert (#AskTheCurator)
• Self explanatory, ask us ANYTHING!
March 29 Day 6 – Museum selfies (#MuseumSelfies)
2013 became the year of the selfie, and so far in 2014 the trend has shown no sign of fading.
March 30 Day 7 – Constraint drives creativity (#GetCreative)
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