24 Hour Museum announces Culture Online City Heritage Guides

Citation

(2004), "24 Hour Museum announces Culture Online City Heritage Guides", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 38 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/prog.2004.28038cab.006

24 Hour Museum announces Culture Online City Heritage Guides

24 Hour Museum announces Culture Online City Heritage Guides

The 24 Hour Museum is set to launch a series of Web guides to the museums, galleries and heritage of ten English cities. “Analysis of how our users search the site shows they look for city-based content”, explains Jane Finnis, 24 Hour Museum Director. “This new project aims to address this need and use the reputation and popularity of our existing site to bring in new audiences for unique city-based content”. The ten cities selected as the subjects of these first heritage guides are: Birmingham, Brighton, Bristol, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Newcastle and Norwich.

City Heritage Guides have been commissioned by the UK Government’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) initiative Culture Online.The City Heritage Guides will be fed automatically from the listings information museums and galleries already post on the 24 Hour Museum site. This live information will be supplemented by specially written news stories and features put together by the 24 Hour Museum editorial team, working in partnership with cultural groups, museum professionals and journalism students in each city. Partnerships have been struck with exemplary national and local organisations:

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  Curiosity and Imagination (www.centresforcuriosity.org.uk);

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  Children’s Express (www.childrens-express.org); and

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  My Brighton and Hove (www.mybrightonandhove.org.uk).

The project team will encourage contributions from local history groups, children’s after-school clubs, museum Saturday clubs and cultural groups from ethnic communities often bypassed by mainstream museum culture. Group leaders and members will be able to put their own online historical and cultural trails together using a simple online authoring system called Storymaker. Downloads of trail content in appropriate translations will be offered where community groups whose first language is not English have offered content.

24 Hour Museum (24HM), set up in 1999, is funded by the DCMS through the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA). The 24 Hour Museum City Heritage Guides are funded by the DCMS’s Culture Online initiative and the database contains information on around 3,000 UK museums, galleries and heritage sites. The site currently attracts over 220,000 visitor sessions per month (average duration of visit ten minutes). The linked children’s site (www.show.me.uk), funded by the Clore Duffield Foundation was launched in November 2003 and currently attracts more than 30,000 visitors per month.

Culture Online aims to:

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  enhance access to the arts for children and young people and give them the opportunity to develop their talents to the full;

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  open up our cultural institutions to the wider community, to promote lifelong learning and social cohesion;

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  extend the reach of new technologies and build IT skills; and

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  support wider and richer engagement and learning by all adults.

For further information please contact Jon Pratty. Tel: +44(0) 12 7382 0044; E-mail: editor@24hourmuseum.org.uk; URL: www.museum.org.uk