We like to keep busy at Hertford Museum and today has been particularly full!
This morning our Curator, Sara, was out buying bookshelves for our new library at our Stores. We’ve cleaned out the room that is going to become the library and carpeted it but now we need shelves to house all the books! If you come along to our Open Stores Day on Saturday 14th July you’ll be able to see how far along our plans are!
Our old Library- you can see why it needed more space and more shelves!
While she was doing that Assistant Curator Sarah was at a meeting of the Hertfordshire Museums Group where we share ideas and news with other local museums. This meeting also involved lots of presentations on projects funded by the Hertfordshire Museums Partnership Small Grant Scheme- our project was updating Modes, the computer programme we use to document our collections, and training our volunteers to use it.
St Catherines School, Hoddesdon, playing with the toys in one of our loans boxes
Our Learning Officer Eleanor has been talking to schools today about our loans boxes- these are themed boxes of objects that schools can borrow to use in their classrooms. We have several on themes including Beside the Seaside, Toys of the Past & Egyptians and we are now involved in a project to research how schools make use of them.
And everyone else has been busy too. Connie our Finance Officer has been updating our accounts whilst our Museum Support Assistants, Julie & Holly, have been looking after the shop and the front desk and answering enquiries (you can read about the kinds of things we get asked in this post from February) and in the garden Alison is clipping the box hedges that make up our knot garden- it’s looking beautiful and green at the moment after all that rain!
The museum knot garden two years ago, visit us to see how much it's grown!
And after all of that this afternoon we’ve been discussing an exhibition we’ll be holding next year on Bengeo! We’ll talk more about the exhibition much nearer the time but we’ve got lots of ideas already.
Weather permitting we will also be running Teas in the Garden during many of our special events over the summer (including carnival and our next booksale) so make sure you watch the website and our newsletter (next edition coming soon!) for details.
