News
CoastEd
Coast Ed Arts Council England for West Sussex Museums Partnership
An Arts Council England funded cultural learning project run by a consortium of six small West Sussex museums.
sam-culture are evaluating the difference Coast Ed is intended to make, considering how the partnership will ensure the programme is meeting its aims and collecting evidence to inform future developments.
National Army Museum: Building for the Future
As National Army Museum€™s Building for the Future project is underway it has a programme of access and outreach activities to expand audiences and to find new ways to interpret its collections and expertise. sam-culture is working with the team to set up evaluation frameworks and mechanisms to collect and interpret evidence to show the extent to which goals are being met and how insights can be used to adapt and improve engagement.
Garden Museum
Four Heritage Lottery Fund project evaluations are underway looking at (i) Gardening in Wartime €“ People, Plants and War; (ii) Public Programming in the Heritage Sector: A Sustainable Model; (iii) HLF Skills for the future and (iv) HLF Collecting Cultures.
Garden Museum need to obtain robust and objective data to demonstrate the success and challenges of these four projects. Research is being undertaken by Pam Jarvis and Mel Larsen.
Update: Feb 2015 Garden Museum Skills for the Future Traineeships Heritage Lottery Fund:
This training project, on sustainability, sought to address challenging issues in the museum sector and develop the new skills required in the sector in the future. The project leaders, working with volunteers, undertook a practical work-based rather than theoretical approach and the evaluation focussed on the development of new skills in environmental sustainability, organisational change, social capital and economics.
culturehive
The Arts Marketing Association created culturehive as a new resource to share and shape best practice in cultural marketing. Pam Jarvis (sam-culture) and Catherine Bunting have been appointed to evaluate culturehive to ensure it is meeting the aims of making best use of collective intelligence and as a mechanism to drive change and stimulate new ideas and techniques.
The latest interim report is now available
Family Audiences at Royal Opera House
Royal Opera House wants to expand the range of opportunities it offers to family audiences to enable it to share the brilliance of its work with people who may consider that opera or ballet are €˜not for them€™ or unaffordable€™. ROH has commissioned Pam Jarvis and Mel Larsen to research broadening the engagement of new family audiences by taking an even more proactive approach to targeting new and emerging audiences that are actively interested in experiencing arts as a family.
The Politics of Participation in Museums
National Conference: Held on Wednesday 12 November 2014 in Brighton
Brighton Museum & Art Gallery and sam-culture hosted a one-day conference €“ The Politics of Participation in Museums.
A conference report is currently in preparation.
The conference featured David Anderson, Piotr Bienkowski, Helen Graham and Bernadette Lynch. Discussions centred around current best practice as museums and galleries develop participatory practice, €˜co-production€™, €˜co-curation'. This conference looked at the challenges of this way of working and questioned its viability in the context of ever-shrinking funding for cultural institutions.