@Hannah_Museums

Dear Cultural Cheerleaders,

It’s been a while, I know. Back when I started this blog in January 2021 I had a lot of ideas about what I wanted this blog to be, places I’d visit and the kind of content I’d be sharing, but we got locked down again and I found myself, like many others spending most my time between work and my comfy sofa. Time passed, many things changed with work and I was riding that rollercoaster that is life.

Now we’re in Summer ’21 however, let’s take a moment to catch up.
As I’m sat writing this I’m enjoying a little bit of garden time with the pups and trying to decide how we do this… so why not start where we ended, by introducing Freddie and Scooby? At the end of January we welcomed 2 new additions to our family, two Chihuahua pups who I’m sure you’ll all by now have seen, as they have occupied a large space on my social media along with an even bigger space in my heart. Honestly, my entire February was taken up spending any spare moment I had with these two, and their older brothers. For anyone who doesn’t know, we also had 3 other dogs, Bertie and Max, (two poodle & chi crosses) and George who is also a Chihuahua.

In February I also started my role as Museums Association Northern Rep, something which I’m extremely proud of. I’m now 6 months into this 3 year role and look forward to connecting with more museums during my time in post. We have the Museums Association Conference coming up soon, which I’m very excited about because it’s going to be both in person and online.
Tickets are available and can be booked here <- You can also find out additional information about the conference and speakers.

On the theme of conferences, 2021 has been well and truly conference season and I’ve been living for it! After 2020s MuseumNext conference I was well and truly ready for more MuseumNext content in my life and 2021 has not disappointed. The Digital Summit was absolute fire and came with the introduction of a new ticketing option, which has since been continued and adopted by other organisers, the opportunity to pay for an organisational ticket, which would give your entire museum staff the opportunity to attend the conference for a fixed price. These tickets proved to be popular, and even though it wasn’t always guaranteed that you could attend all the talks it really didn’t matter, because talks were uploaded for viewing on demand, which worked around peoples busy schedules. Those of us who could join in live with talks still had a great time though, using the live chat feature and tweeting along, as always. It’s no secret how much I love MuseumNext and you can keep up with them here. By signing up to their conferences and events you also get added to the MuseumNext community. Don’t forget to also check CultureGeek which is ran by the MuseumNext team.

We’re almost up to date… but I couldn’t give an update without mentioning my new job(s). I started the year still working at Jarrow Hall, as their Collections Project Officer, which was fixed term and had an end date of June 2021, and as that approached I became less and less ready to leave… and I didn’t! I accepted a new role as their Collections and Engagement Coordinator, so that I could continue to care for and manage their collection, whilst also working on ways to make it more accessible. This has been an absolute dream and throughout April and May I’d been settling into this new position which was also a promotion *inserts the cool faced emoji* …. however, that’s not all because around about the same time I started to do a bit of project work back at Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums. This was working for Ancestry, and my induction for this role was in May.

I have continued to organise #MuseumHour, recruiting another co-organiser and have also been planning events for Space Invaders North and developing North and North East Emerging Arts + Culture Network which you’ll all know is very close to my heart.

It’s been a busy 2021 so far, but at least for now I’m feeling much more settled in work and life and I’m very much looking forward to things fully reopen again, although I know that I will continue to be careful for quite some time yet.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I have also bought a new camera, which I’m looking forward to getting to use especially for content on this blog and my linked social media pages which are:

Twitter: @CulturalCheer Instagram: @CulturalCheerleader

If you’d like to see more puppy pics, feel free to follow my personal accounts too:
@HannahRMather & you can also subscribe to my YouTube which will be getting more content soon I promise.

H ❤