|
Martello Tower #2 completed in 1805 |
One of the great successes from
our short time cataloguing at the Hurdy Gurdy has been our introduction of social media to provide information on the composition of the collection. The team
who operate the Hurdy Gurdy, stalworths of hard work and knowledge, had already
set up a
Facebook
page and created a
website.
With the addition of our
Omeka
catalogue we could highlight the collection as we updated the catalogue.
However, through a conversation one day at the Museum, it became apparent to us
all, that Twitter was the modern communication equivalent of
Marconi
and
De Forest. So we set up
a Twitter account for the Hurdy Gurdy and began promoting the collection to as
wide an audience as possible. Thus began our small effort to follow in the
footsteps of the
National Library of Ireland
who have increased their audience engagement via Twitter and Flickr, by putting
a more ‘human’ face on a national institution.
|
1929 national collection receipt |
Our initial strategy began with
following people and organisations that were somehow associated with radio,
history, and museums. Very quickly we received retweets, favourites
and our steady band of ‘followers’ started to increase. The weekend that we tweeted images of a receipt for the 1929
Fianna Fรกil national collection we received a huge amount of interest. As Marie-Therese
had set up Google analytics on our Omeka site, it was easy to calculate when
our audience had been viewing the collection and what was of particular
interest.
|
Google analytics for October |
This interest encouraged us in our efforts in highlighting the
collection to as wide an audience as possible. So we refocused our efforts on
cataloguing the Irish ephemera within the Museum’s collection.
As with everything concerning the operation
of the catalogue and the metadata collection, this is a team effort, we both
tweet and manage the Twitter interaction for the site, in between our day jobs.
This is the real bonus of social media; we can manage to keep it all going
because of how easy it is to connect with our audience via our smartphones,
laptops, and tablets.
|
Rental receipt from 1908 with Edward VII stamp |
Twitter has proved invaluable, as
we’ve shared items from the collection with not only our Irish followers, but
have engendered interest as far afield as Rio and the United States. Now on any
given weekend, we can have visitors through the door from Japan, Luxembourg or
the Ukraine. Twitter, Facebook, the website not to mention the Omeka
catalogue enable us to
spread our ‘Hurdy Gurdy’ net even further. We have regular conversations now
with a follower in San Francisco who is Irish,
broadcasting a
radioshow of pre-1950’s recordings. These are connections we couldn’t have
made via the normal avenues available to a small independent museum. Overtime,
we hope to increase the amount of interest in our collection, in the Martello Tower itself
and in the history of communication within the island of Ireland. This
hopefully will be achieved by our use of
social media, our cataloguing of the
vast collection and by the interest and engagement of our audience.
Sarah Connolly - Cataloguer Hurdy Gurdy Museum of Vintage Radio
Marie-Therese Carmody - Cataloguer Hurdy Gurdy Museum of Vintage Radio
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