The working life of Museum of London

If you were in the Museum of London last weekend you might have seen a man sitting on the mezzanine above our foyer with two laptops in front of him talking to family groups.  What was he doing?

We wanted to keep a slight air of mystery around the project whilst we were still consulting audiences because we wanted the people who we were consulting not to have any preconceived ideas. Now that the consultation’s finished I can now tell you a bit more about the project that this was leading to.

Martin, ‘the man on the mezzanine’, was carrying out some audience consultation with us as part of a project we’re working on to redevelop two important aspects of our website – our factpacks and our picturebank for schools.

About factpacks and picturebank

There are various ways to find our existing factpacks, but one way is to go to : the factpacks page within the Kids section. Our factpacks are basically short introductions to an area of London’s history.  You can use them to find out, for example, about:

• Children in Victorian London
• What life was like in Medieval London
• Suffragettes

And lots of other topics too. We think our factpacks are really interesting, but some of them are quite old now, and some of them are buried quite deep within our site. We’re taking this opportunity to refresh them and to add new ones as well.

The picturebank is a resource that’s mainly for schools and you can find it at: www.museumoflondon.org.uk/picturebank. It’s a collection of images divided up by topic that we think school teachers and pupils might find interesting.  Again, it’s got some great material in it, but we think it needs a bit of a new look so we’re refreshing it.

About the audience consultation

On top of the consultation with families, Martin also conducted a focus group with teachers and we’re delighted that over 200 people completed our online survey recently about how they use online resources!  If you were one of these people, thank you very much – your information has been very useful.

I wanted to make sure as much as possible that people answered the questionnaire and attended the focus groups with an open mind, without knowing what we were working towards.  As such, this consultation was quite general, and was about finding out how you use the web, what kinds of material you look for, where you look for it, what you like/dislike about it, how you look at it (online/printed off etc).

What we found out

Rather pleasingly we didn’t really discover much we hadn’t anticipated! Even so it was very useful for us to talk to different audiences and get a real picture of how they behaved online, and then get a judgement on what they thought of our existing resources.

Here’s a quick summary of our findings:

• People mostly use Google as a starting point to find images or information about a historical period (no great surprises there)
• People like to be able to click around and explore a topic and choose their own path through it
• Some people like to print things off, in which case they like it to look nice (i.e. not just a printout of a webpage that doesn’t print very well) when they print it
• Text needs to broken up into sections and broken up with images
• Teachers particularly would ideally like to be able to edit any resources that we provide to make them relevant and suitable for their particular students. This means if they’re downloading documents, they want Word format rather than PDFs
• Teachers will generally make their own resources out of what we provide so we should provide easy-to-find images and information that they can cut and paste
• The BBC History website and BBC Bitesize are particularly popular places to look for historical information, particularly for children
• There are a few websites that come up time and time again as good sources of material for schools – particularly Woodlands Junior school
• Quite a few people hadn’t considered that a Museum website might have information about historical events or historical images
• The families we spoke to didn’t tend to think of using a museum website to prepare for a visit other than to look at opening times, how to get here etc
• The most common place to look at these resources seems to be on a home computer

So the next task is to write all of this up in detail and work out how we’re going to proceed.  We’ve got some pretty good ideas of what we’ll do.  It’s likely that we’ll rename the factpacks ‘Pocket Histories’. What do you think of the name? We’ve decided what topics we’d like to do first and we’re starting to get things moving.

What can you do to help?

• Keep an eye out in the first few months of 2011 for these new resources
• Let us know what you think of them in another online questionnaire at the end of the project
• Let us know what website you like to use to find historical information or historical images
• Leave a comment below if you’d be interested in taking part in any future website consultations like the one I’ve outlined above
• Let us know what aspects of London’s history you’d be interested in finding out more about
• Remember – Museum websites are a treasure trove of information – not just information about opening times. Next time you visit us, take a look around our website first to find out a bit more about what you can see.