Archive for March, 2012

Planning for the Easter Holidays at Hertford Museum

Wednesday, March 28th, 2012

It feels like Spring is definitely here, in fact at the moment it feels like Summer is here, and that means it must be nearly time for the Easter Holidays!

As usual there’s plenty to do at Hertford Museum over the holidays.

Cartoon OctopusCopyright Mark A. Hicks

Under the Sea craft activities

Take part in craft activities themed around all things aquatic! Tuesday 3rd – Thursday 5th and Tuesday 10th – Thursday 12th April 2012

Cartoon boy swimming underwater

Our activities run from 10.30 am to 3.30 pm and cost £1.50 per child, drop-in

In week one you can make a paper plate port hole and an octopus or starfish and in week two we’ll be painting underwater scenes and making a cork boat!

Hertford Museum & RNLI Easter Trail

Have a go at this trail around some of Hertford’s shops and businesses from Saturday 31st March – Sunday 15th April

Hertford Museum has teamed up with a local RNLI fundraising group to organise another fun trail around the town centre shops. This year the trail, which runs over the Easter Holidays, has the shops each choosing a lifeboat station around the UK as the theme for their display. There will also be two trails this year! Our usual one for families and a trickier, cryptic, one for adults!

Trails cost £1 each and are on sale at the museum.

RNLI Lifeboat 'Maurice & Joyce Hardy'
© Copyright Natalia A McKenzie and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

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Family fun at Hertford Museum

Wednesday, March 21st, 2012

At Hertford Museum we’re always trying to find new ways to encourage more visitors to the museum AND to improve things for our existing visitors.

As part of a project called Effective Museums our Learning Officer Eleanor has beeing working really hard on some new ideas for visiting families.

If you visit the museum today you might notice our new Discovery Station.

Hertford Museum's new Children's Discovery Station

Visiting children can choose 2 or 3 things from the boxes- like a magnifying glass or some finger puppets or even a magic wand!- to take round the museum and the instruction sheet gives you ideas of how to use them.

There are also some books available in the galleries for you to read as a family if you have a chance.

Some children's books that are now available to read in the museum

But that’s only the start of our plans! At the moment we’re collecting questions from children to help us put together special fact files for some of our objects and there might be some more fun interactive areas appearing in the museum as well.

Keep watching this blog/facebook/twitter and visiting the museum and let us know what you think of our new ideas!

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A day in the life of our volunteers at Hertford Museum

Wednesday, March 14th, 2012

A volunteers meeting

This week we thought we would bring you a resume of the tasks our volunteers are working on at Hertford Museum today; Wednesday being our busiest day for volunteers…

Liz has been inputting onto our museum collections database ‘Modes Complete’ details from the book ‘The History of Hertford Castle’ by WF Andrews.  WilliamFrampton (WF) Andrews was one of the founding fathers of Hertford Museum, along with his brother Robert Thornton (RT) Andrews.

Fran and Terry are creating an inventory of our photograph collection (which comprises of over 12,000 images!) as well as organising the Friends of Hertford Museum summer garden party scheduled for Saturday 7th July.

Our work experience student from The Sele School has been taking photographs of some of our small archaeological finds, downloading the images onto the computer and then renaming the photograph files.  This is a really useful job as these images will eventually be uploaded onto the individual database entry for each object.

Donna is inputting details of a variety of photographs onto Modes Complete.

The museum was donated the Hertford Addis factory collection and archive in 2002 and Robin is cataloguing the Addis factory paper archives, including documents such as accounts, letters and memos. 

An oral history, is a recording of someone talking about their memories of certain events and Jean has been checking many of these files for mentions of Hertford shops and businesses that are not clearly audible.  She is now looking in the relevant Kelly’s Directories of local Hertford businesses to corroborate these records.  This will make the oral history transcripts (or typed up versions of the audio file, which every oral history has to have) complete, making more sense to us and of course of more use!

Activity volunteers Gillian and Dawn

We have over 40 volunteers at Hertford Museum that help us on a daily basis and at the moment we are currently unable to take on any more to help with collections work.  However, if you are interested in volunteering in the future, please email us your CV and interests to hertfordmuseum@btconnect.com and we shall be in touch after September if we are able to take on any more.

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SHARE- training for museum staff

Wednesday, March 7th, 2012

Today our assistant curator, Sarah Keeling, is away on a training day to help brush up her skills working with archaeology collections.

Learning is central to what museums do and that means schools, families, adult learning, volunteer training AND staff training.

In the East of England museums are very lucky to have the SHARE scheme (Support, Help and Advice in Renaissance East) which allows museum to share knowledge and skills in various ways including funding, networking opportunities, specialist consultants as well as a regular training programme. Because all the museums within SHARE work together to provide the training (speakers, places to meet, materials to use etc.) the sessions are free for other SHARE members so we can afford to send staff and volunteers on important courses they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do.

Staff (and volunteers) at Hertford Museum use SHARE a lot and in the last year various people have been on courses about.

  • Storage and display of hats

  • Pest Management
  • Environmental Monitorig
  • Object Handling
  • Conservation Housekeeping

and now Archaeology!

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