Museum140

New Website!

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 13:12:56 +0100

29 January

We’re pleased to announce our new website, which now combines our portfolio of projects and our blog under one roof:

This means that this Tumblr site will no longer be updated. Please come and visit us on our new website instead, where you’ll be able to subscribe to our RSS feed and other social media channels too. Thank you!

Follow-a-Museum on Friday 1st February

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 07:14:41 +0100

25 January 2012

If you enjoy following museums on social media, then mark your diaries for a week today, Friday 1st February, as it’s Follow-a-Museum day on Twitter. First initiated in 2010 by Sumo design agency in the UK, museums in Germany have since claimed the idea for the community and have continued to celebrate Follow-a-Museum day on the 1st of February each year, spear headed by Roland Wagner and his museum and sightseeing web portal visitatio.de.

Since Museum140 agrees it’s actually a good idea to do each year, and as we’re now based in Germany, we thought we’d get behind it and try and make it go global again this year. And don’t forget, in Berlin you can follow-a-museum for real at #MuseUp, 4pm at the Deutsches Historisches Museum.

So tune in this Friday, share your favourite museums and museum lists, and discover some new museums to follow. See you on Twitter!

Save the Date: MuseUp at the DHM im Berlin on 1 February

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 11:38:12 +0100

14 January 2012

After our first successful MuseUp last November at the C/O Berlin, we’re pleased to announce that the next Berlin MuseUp will be taking place at the Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM), so mark your diaries for 4pm on Friday 1 February.

The idea for a MuseUp at the DHM was first brought up in December, but due to the fact that the galleries at the DHM have no WiFi or phone reception, a creative alternative for had to be found. The current special exhibition at the museum is called “The Desire for Freedom. Art in Europe since 1945” - so why not take that concept of freedom one step further? Instead of of letting the reception-less interior of the museum get in the way, why not just bring the museum outside? Why not make the impossible possible?

The solution was to transform a selection of artworks from the exhibition into QR codes around the exterior of the museum building. A guided tour in English as well as German will lead participants through the objects while they tweet their impressions via the hashtag #MuseUp, and as usual anyone further afield can follow everything and join in online. Afterwards, there will also be an opportunity to see the rest of the exhibition indoors.

We’d love to be able to take credit for this unique idea, but the creative brains behind it have been Roland Wagner from visitatio.de, together with the DHM itself. However, when they contacted us to ask if we’d like to be involved, of course we said yes!

So, if you’re in Berlin, we hope you’ll brave the winter weather and join us, Visitatio and the DHM on 1 February for our inside-out MuseUp. It also happens to be Folloa-a-Museum day on Twitter that day, so why not come and follow a museum with us for real? More details on the exhibition and how to sign up to follow shortly.

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For German coverage about this event, visit the DHM Blog. Anyone new to the concept of MuseUp and Tweetups can also read up further on this in our previous post.

Happy New Year!

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 10:23:39 +0100

7 January 2012

A happy new year to all our friends, fans and followers! We’re starting the new year with over 200 fans on Facebook and over 2,000 followers on Twitter - thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!!

Here are some highlights from last year:

In February, the new digital magazine sisterMAG launched, featuring an article about Adopt-a-Museum! The project was also featured that same month on the German blog Ausstellungen Einstellungen.

In March, we celebrated our first birthday with a call for cake recipes and a Twitter chat about Museum Cafes.

In April, we had a World Book Day giveaway to celebrate UNESCO World Book and Copyright Day.

In May, #MuseoSpark - a Twitter chat about on what inspires people about museums, to celebrate International Museums Day - saw our first ever collaboration, with Culture Themes.

In June, Jenni got interviewed by THEMUSEUM Blog about our Adopt-a-Museum project.

In July, we launched out new long term project “Museum Souvenirs” - an online collection of souvenirs acquired from or through museums, which anyone can contribute to, so if you are interested please get in touch!

In September, we were thrilled to welcome our 2,000th fan on Twitter, and sent out a little goodie bag as a thank you. Unfortunately we couldn’t send all our fans and followers something, but THANK YOU to you all!

We were even more thrilled to feature out 50th Adopt-a-Museum in September! But we are always on the lookout for new participants, so if you would like to help us with the next 50, please get in touch!

November saw our first ever offline event - a museum tweetup at the C/O Berlin, organised together with our wonderful friend Hie-suk Yang.

And in December, we went a bit Christmas crazy. First of all there was Secret Santa 2.0 and a new Advent Calendar, both back by popular demand. Then we started collecting pictures of museum Christmas trees from around the world on Pinterest. And finally there was our Christmas Bauble Contest, with a total of 14 entries. The winner was Russell Dornan’s bauble with mini origami stars made from museum leaflets (see above).

For 2013, we have a few changes at Museum140 in the works, including a new website, and, as ever, many ideas. We’ll keep you posted, of course, but for now we just want to say a big THANK YOU for all your support over the last two years!!

Our Favourite Baubles

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 01:30:49 +0100

25 December 2012

Congratulations again to Russell for winning our Christmas Bauble Contest with his mini origami stars. We loved the idea of making them out of museum leaflets!

Since Museum140 was the organiser of the contest, none of the team were eligible to enter a bauble or to win the voters’ prize, but of course we still all had our favourites (though it was a difficult choice with all the fantastic entries) so we’ve decided to share them with you :-)

Jenni’s favourite was the “genius” knitted museum submitted by Marie from Belgium.

@thingsinjars though the bauble submitted by Nina from Denmark was “magical”.

And #MuseumBaby loved the glittery spaceman bauble :-)

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And with that the Museum140 team wishes you all a very Merry Christmas! Thanks to everyone for following us, taking part in our projects, and generally supporting us along the way. We’ll be back in the new year.

And the winner of our Christmas Bauble Contest is...

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 10:28:00 +0100

24 December 2012

We received 14 entries from 6 different countries to our Christmas Bauble Contest, six of which are now hanging on our tree (thanks to the senders!) and of the others we received photographs. Although decorating them with a museum theme was not a mandatory part of the rules, we were pleased about the many museum-y entries. But it wasn’t up to us to choose the winner, that was down to the public. And from the word “go” there was a run away favourite which managed to maintain its lead all the way to the end:

With a total of 29% of the 160 votes, Russell Dornan’s bauble filled with mini origami stars took the prize. He folded the stars out of leaflets from the museum he works at!

We’ve also picked another winner, as promised, at random from all the people who voted but we won’t be able to make the name public (if they agree) until we’ve contacted them.

Thank you to everyone who took part, whether by decorating bauble, voting or simply helping to spread the word. We’ve had great fun, and we hope you have too!

Adopt-a-Museum #54: Junibacken

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 21:34:52 +0100

Adopt-a-Museum #54: Junibacken:

27 November 2012

Before Adopt-a-Museum goes on its winter break, we’re very pleased to introduce our first Swedish entry, Junibacken, where kids can experience the wonderful world of the late children’s author Astrid Lindgren. Adopted by Dörte Nielandt.

Ask Us Anything

Fri, 23 Nov 2012 21:19:00 +0100

23 November 2012

It’s that time of the month of again, the last Friday already. Time for another round of ‘Ask us anything!’ You are welcome to ask us anything about any of our projects, or about anything else you’ve always wanted to know about Museum140. Just leave a comment below, or, if you’d like to ask anonymously, use the ‘ask us anything’ page.

Bauble Contest Sign Up Extended!

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 15:59:00 +0100

22 November 2012

You guys are great! We are overwhelmed by the positive response to our Christmas Bauble Contest. We were a tiny bit worried no one would sign up, since it is asking for quite some commitment, but you all seem to be fully in the festive spirit ;-)

There are still three baubles up for grabs, waiting for someone to decorate them, so we’ve decided to extend the deadline for signing up. We’ll just leave it open until the last few baubles have found a home, though keep in mind that you’ll still need to get them (or a photograph of your finished masterpiece) to us by 15th December, so the longer you leave it the less time you’ll have.

If you’re still undecided, then perhaps this little sneak peek of the goody bags that can be won (one for the bauble with most votes, one for a voter picked at random), including some festive treats and souvenirs from some of our favourite museums.

By the way, this isn’t everything that will be in the goody bags, we want to keep some of it as a surprise, so we’re only showing you a selection ;-)

To sign up to take part and receive a bauble to decorate, just email us with your postal address (please note your address will only be used to send you your bauble and will not be passed on to any third parties). For further details about the Christmas Bauble Contest, check our previous post.

Secret Santa 2.0 (back by popular demand)

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 09:29:00 +0100

16 November 2012

If you’ve been following us for a while, you may remember Secret Santa 2.0 which took place over on Jenni’s blog Museum Diary last year. Maybe you even took part. Everyone who signed up was given the name and address of someone in return, to whom they then had to send a surprise parcel to in time for Christmas. It could be either something you’d bought or, if you were feeling creative, something you made, along with a Christmas greeting.

The event was so successful (almost 40 people took part), that we’re bringing it back this year by popular demand and making it part of the official Museum140 programme., but we’ve taken on board feedback both from our own event and from other similar events, and made a few changes.

One thing that sadly happened last year was a few parcels never made it to their destination (though we did send those affected a wee surprise parcel in the new year so that no one was left empty handed). Without exception these were all trans-Atlantic parcels, and we think customs may have had something to do with it as many people were sending food items, which can have restrictions on them. So this year, we are going to match up people from the same country - or at a minimum the same continent - instead of doing a global free for all.

The other thing was that despite the idea of it all being secret, people actually used it as a way of networking, introducing themselves to each other and even exchanging business contact details. We think this is great, because at Museum140 we’re all about communication and networking. So, this year we’re going to pair people up to exchange gifts with each other. It’s a little less secret, but it has the advantage that you can also double check addresses and let each other know when you’ve sent your parcel off. We’ve taken this idea from other gift exchanges we’ve seen, and it’s been proven to reduce the rate of parcels not reaching their destination (e.g. maybe the postman tried to deliver when you were out and the note went missing, but if you know the parcel is due to arrive you can chase it up).

So, we hope that if you took part last year you’ll sign up again, despite the small changes, and if it’s your first year without we hope you’ll consider joining in too. All you have to do to take part is email us your name and postal address (you can use your work address, if you prefer), mentioning Secret Santa, and then wait to receive the address of your exchange partner. The deadline to sign up is Friday 30 November.

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Remember, Secret Santa 2.0 is about fun and sharing and surprises, not about spending a fortune, so the recommended value for parcels is around £5/ $5/ €5 (plus postage).

#MuseUp Storified

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 08:17:31 +0100

14 November 2012

Wow, what can we say?! First up, a BIG thank you to everyone who came to our first ever MuseUp at the C/O Berlin on Monday night and helped to make it a success! The event was fully booked, with around 30 tweeters and also some bloggers taking part. We also had at least a dozen tweeps following us online from a distance, some of whom were very active e.g. looking up relevant articles or youtube videos and tweeting the links.

In total, over 200 original tweets documented the event, as well as over 100 RTs and several dozen @ mentions. Hashtracking.com estimated that the 389 tweets generated on on Monday reached an audience of over 61,000 followers. Furthermore, many more tweets were sent in the run up to Monday helping to spread the word. In total we archived over 400 tweets on TweetArchivist.com since last week.

(screenshot)

For our guided tour round the C/O Berlin, we split up into two groups. The English group started in the Joel Sternfeld Retrospektive, working their way through the exhibition chronologically. So that we wouldn’t get in each other’s way, the German group started in the Deutsche Börse (German Stock Exchange) Photography Prize, which the English group visited last, and then worked their way backwards in time through Joel Sternfeld. In the end we all met again at the entrance and headed off for a drink and a bite to eat together, carrying on the conversation about our experiences of the exhibitions, this time not on Twitter but in real life ;-)

We’ve created a Storify summary of the English tweets sent during the MuseUp.The German group seemed to have the more avid Tweeters (while the English group had more bloggers), but there were still a fair amount of English tweets gathering impressions.

You can also read a summary of the German MuseUp tweets here.

We hope this was the first of many MuseUps. Our plan is to hold them every couple of months at different museums throughout Berlin. If you are a museum in Berlin and would like to host a MuseUp in 2013, please get in touch!

Get Involved: Christmas Bauble Contest 2012

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 18:41:00 +0100

5 November 2012

Oh my, it’s November already. Only seven weeks until Christmas! Some of you may already be wondering, what we’ve got up our sleeve for you this year. Do you remember our crowdsourced Christmas tree from last year? Due to #MuseumBaby’s rather destructive tendencies where Christmas trees were concerned, we opted for a 2D painted paper tree, and we asked you to help us decorate it by drawing baubles for us. And one lucky artist won a Christmas goody bag.

Well, this year #MuseumBaby is older and wiser (well, definitely older), so we’re going to risk a real tree here at Museum140 HQ - and we’re going 3D with our baubles too!

We have a whole bowl full of plastic baubles, waiting to be decorated from the inside and/ or outside. Decorating a bauble is limited to the first 20 people to sign up this time, as that’s as many baubles as we’ve got ;-) But there will be an opportunity for the rest of you to get involved by voting for your favourite bauble. Here’s how it works:

By 21 November: Sign up to decorate a bauble (limited to 20 people).

22 November: We will send out the plastic baubles to you. We will also send a first batch of baubles out on 13 November to anyone who signs up before then.

By 15 December: You have until the 15 December to decorate your bauble and get it back to us in time for voting, either by sending us the bauble itself or a high resolution photograph. By the way, you don’t have to decorate it with a museum theme - though Brownie points from us if you do ;-)

17 - 23 December: Everyone can vote for their favourite bauble! (details to follow)

At the end of the voting, the bauble with the most votes will receive a goody bag. We’ll also draw a name at random from all the voters to win a second goody bag. We’ll announce the winners on Christmas Eve.

Sound like fun? Then email us your postal address now*, mentioning the crowdsourced Christmas tree, to sign up and if you’re lucky enough to be among the first 20, you’ll find a bauble in your mailbox very soon waiting to be decorated.

While it would be wonderful to receive back all the baubles to hang on our tree, we realise that there are costs involved with this and we don’t want to exclude anyone from taking part. So, we’re happy about any bauble that finds its way back to us, but if you want to keep it to hang on your own tree or give it to someone as a gift, that’s fine too. All we ask is that you take some photographs of your finished masterpiece for us.

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*Your address will be handled with strict confidence. It will not be used for any other purposes than sending you your bauble and will not be passed on to third parties.

MuseUp Update: the C/O Berlin & Joel Sternfeld

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 11:06:11 +0100

2 November 2012

In case you hadn’t heard the news, we’re launching our first ever museum tweetup – MuseUp – at the C/O Berlin on Monday 12^th November together with Timeline e.v. with a guided tour (both in English and in German) around the new Joel Sternfeld exhibition. Attendance is free but ticketed.

Many of you have already signed up, in fact, half of the tickets have already gone. But for those of you still undecided, here’s some more information, as promised, on the C/O Berlin and the exhibition in question.

C/O Berlin

The C/O Berlin showcases international photography exhibitions on aprox. 2000 square metres of exhibition space in the former Royal Post Office (Postfuhramt) building on Oranienburger Straße in Berlin, Germany. The exhibitions of renowned artists are supplemented by a programme of artist talks, lectures, discussions and guided tours, thus offering a forum of round about the topics of visuality and photography. The privately supported institution also fosters young photographers through its “Talents” format, as well as offering learning opportunities for children (“Junior”) and young people (“Teens”).

Joel Sternfeld Retrospektive

As one of the founders of New Color Photography, Joel Sternfeld helped to establish colour photography as an artistic medium in fine-art. In the 70s and 80s he toured the USA in a minibus, discovery beauty in the everyday and mundane. American Prospects tells of this journey. The Retrospektive includes three other of Sternfeld’s series. On This Site documents crime scenes, silent relics of violence and crime. Sweet Earth complements this documentation with American landscapes under human influence, whilst Strangers Passing captures American society itself.

So, hopefully we’ve whet your appetite, and if you’re in Berlin you’ll come along and help make our first ever MuseUp a success. Here’s a summary of the details:

When: Monday 12^th November, 6pm

Where: C/O Berlin, Oranienburger Str. 35/36 (U6 Oranienburger Tor, S1 S2 S25 Oranienburger Straße) – meet at the main entrance ticket desk

How: Register via Eventbrite by 9^th November (the event is free but spaces are limited). Bring your smartphone (or other device) on the night and tweet away!

Hashtag: #MuseUp

If enough people are up for it we’ll head out for a drink together afterwards.

Adopt-a-Museum #53: MIBA - museu d’idees i invents de barcelona

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 12:53:00 +0100

Adopt-a-Museum #53: MIBA - museu d’idees i invents de barcelona:

30 October 2012

Adopt-a-Museum returns to Spain for the fifth time this week with the MIBA - museu d’idees i invents de barcelona (Engl: museum of ideas and inventions), adopted by Sonia Barahona.

Ask Us Anything

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 21:18:00 +0200

26 October 2012

Meetup. Tweetup. MuseUp.

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 16:11:00 +0200

16 October 2012

The last few weeks have been a bit of a roller-coater ride for us. Over 2,000 followers on Twitter, 200 fans on Facebook, and we featured our 50th Adopt-a-Museum. Where to from here?

Well, after 18 months of successful online social media projects, we’re super excited to announce our first offline project. You may remember a few weeks ago we tweeted live from the launch party of Timeline, a new initiative that aims to bring together people and projects in the digital world. And now we’re teaming up with Timeline to launch a series of museum tweetups here in Berlin. We’ve been playing with the idea of organising Tweetups for museums for a while, and so has Hie-suk Yang, who is part of the Timeline team. So, we thought, what could be better for a co-operation!

Under the name MuseUp we want to bring Tweetups to a range of large and small, renowned and unusual museums in the larger Berlin area. Every three to four months, Twitter fanatics and newbies, bloggers, photo enthusiasts and of course museum fans can look forward to a new museum Tweetup. We’ll be covering the English side of MuseUp, whilst Timeline will accompany you in German.

We’re looking forward to getting to know you, and to tweeting together with you!

The first #MuseUp will take place on Monday, 12 November in the C|O Berlin at 6pm. We’ll be inviting you on a free guided tour, both in English and in German, around the new Joel Sternfeld exhibition. Places are limited, so you will need to register. We’ll be posting more details about the Tweetup and the exhibition both here and on Timeline soon. In the mean time, if you already want to register, just head over to Eventbrite.

For everyone who is now scratching their head and asking themselves what on earth a museum Tweetup is, it’s basically a meetup, usually a guided tour, where the participants give a running commentary on Twitter with their impressions, photographs etc. Other Twitter users can join in online, e.g. by tweeting in questions. Everyone uses the same hashtag to keep the discussion together (our hashtag will be #MuseUp).

First to introduce museum Tweetups in Germany where the Kulturkonsorten in Munich, in September 2011, followed by KultUp in Frankfurt in March 2012. If you read German, Kulturkonsorten give an overview of their format, whilst KultUp keep a very good photo archive on Flickr. A popular way of documenting tweetups is via Storify, such as in this example of a recent Tweetup from the Kulturkonsorten.

We hope we’ve whet your appetite for more, and if you’re in Berlin on 12 November, we look forward to welcoming you to our very first MuseUp!

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For further reading:

1. Tweetup im American Museum of Natural History (EN)

2. Das 1. Tweetup der Kulturkonsorten (DE)

3. Tweetup im Jüdischen Museum Berlin (DE)

4. Was ist ein KultUp? (DE)

Adopt-a-Museum #52: C|O Berlin

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 12:54:00 +0200

Adopt-a-Museum #52: C|O Berlin:

9 October 2012

Adopt-a-Museum takes us back to Berlin for the third time this week, to the C|O Berlin - International Forum for Visual Dialogue, adopted by Ashley Ludaescher.

Ask Us Anything

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 21:13:00 +0200

28 September 2012

How to #askacurator

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 21:08:00 +0200

26 September 2012

We hope you all enjoyed Ask-a-Curator, whether you were one the giving or receiving end of the questions ;-)

Jenni has written up her top ten tips for how participating museums can make it a success, which we thought might be useful to some of our followers:

Shout it from the rooftops
Publish your programme
Get a head start
Work that hashtag!
Butt in
Show some humour
Go multi-lingual
Re-tweet
Be an archivist
Follow up

For a full version of Jenni’s top ten tips, head over to Museum Diary.

Adopt-a-Museum #51: Pearl Button Museum

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 21:09:00 +0200

Adopt-a-Museum #51: Pearl Button Museum:

25 September 2012

This week’s Adopt-a-Museum takes us back to the USA and sounds cute as a button (sorry, we couldn’t resist). The Pearl Button Museum is located in Iowa and has been adopted by Robert P. Connolly.