Jobs Archive

Shropshire Museums' service sits within the Culture, Leisure & Tourism section of Shropshire Council and currently manages operations at Shrewsbury Museum & Art Gallery, Shrewsbury Castle, Acton Scott Historic Working Farm, Much Wenlock Museum, Shropshire Museums' Collections Centre and Coleham Pumping Station.

Linking communities, stories and experiences via the fascinating collections and spaces in our care are the guiding principles upon which our service sits. Shropshire Museums are seeking a Curator with a minimum of three years curatorial experience to work across the county.

The post holder will be capable of motivating teams of volunteers and project-related staff; identifying their skills and monitoring their performance.

The successful candidate will combine methodical working practices with excellent communication skills and will be an enthusiastic advocate for the collections and spaces cared for by Shropshire Museums.

The Powell-Cotton Museum invites applications for an Audience Development Consultant (ADC) to lead on building networks with the Museum’s local communities (both well represented and underrepresented) and to develop a series of workshops and focus group sessions that will bring those audiences into our ‘Colonial Critters’ project. This work aims to establish best practice for working with community groups going forward and is a test case for collaborative interpretation and research for museum displays and activities across the Powell-Cotton in the future.

Colonial Critter project:

The Colonial Critters project, and this audience development contract, will be the starting point for a museum-wide shift into proactive engagement and community collaboration. Historically, the Museum has focused on audiences who already felt ‘at home’ in our space and comfortable with our historic interpretation and displays. Community engagement projects we have undertaken have been small interventions, and often timebound, where relationships with underrepresented audiences have trailed away as funding finishes. Colonial Critters is more than a short-term project; it will be a test bed that creates a framework for community engagement and collaboration to be embedded within the organisation.

The Powell-Cotton Museum’s dioramas are visual spectacles that delight audiences but aren’t representations of ‘real life’. This is an intrinsically colonial collection – the mounted animals were hunted across Africa and the Indian subcontinent, mainly in regions under European colonial control. Their histories as both living animals and museum objects are bound up in colonisation and its exploitation of natural resources and human labour. The dioramas represent much more than just the remains of long-dead animals: they are time capsules, unchanged since they were built, preserving Percy Powell-Cotton’s view of the world. But this is only the most visible layer of a complicated story that has never been fully explored. Present interpretation is exclusionary, singularly focused on the Powell-Cotton point of view.

Colonial Critters will thoroughly research the history of the dioramas and produce new interpretation for the natural history galleries, informed by our audiences. Through this process we hope to refresh our oldest galleries, using these historical displays to tell new stories about the many people – and animals – who made the Museum.

We want this project to be democratising: we will bring our audience with us on this journey to better understand our shared past and decide where we want to be as a museum in the future. We will engage with our various stakeholders through workshops and focus groups using the archives and collections, and take the collections out into accessible, safe community spaces and create temporary ‘pop-up museums’ in the local area. Through this process, we hope to break down some of the visible and invisible barriers to access that currently exist and give space and representation to many voices within the Museum.

The brief:

The Audience Development Consultant will work with our Project Team to deliver the following:

· Identify the priority audience groups for the project. Consider the characteristics, needs and interests of each audience group and identify how best to overcome any barriers and engage with them to promote greater understanding of the aims and objectives of the project.
· Develop communication messages / approaches which incorporate strong project brands appropriate to the needs and interests of the target audiences.
· Plan and cost a programme of events and activities to engage communities that include but are not limited to:
o The development and delivery of focus groups with specific community groups with the purpose to provide audience feedback on our research and to steer the development of new interpretation for displays.
o In collaboration with our Learning and Engagement officers, develop and deliver a ‘pop-up museum’ for use at local festivals, heritage open days, community centres and libraries for the purposes of publicising the project as it develops and gather audience feedback.

· Deliver (with support of project team members) the programme of events and activities to engage communities.
· Develop and deliver a training programme in audience development and community engagement for project team members. The purpose is to upskill team members and embed new practices within the organisation.
· Undertake evaluation on each aspect of the project and provide a comprehensive report on the audience development and community engagement aspects of the project so that the Museum has a framework and lessons learnt for moving forward with future projects of this nature.

We are looking for someone who is passionate about helping us change our museum audience landscape and build a more inclusive future. We expect applicants to have extensive knowledge of audience development and collaborative activity in the heritage sector and an understanding of the existing barriers that exclude non-audiences so that we can work to break those down at the Powell-Cotton Museum.

Colonial Critters will be of interest to anyone looking at ways in which we can decolonise museums through broadening participation, collaborative learning, and interpretation development.

An exciting entry-level opportunity to work with Designated geology collections at an award winning museum.

Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery Trust is a major independent regional museum welcoming over 200,000 visitors every year. We are the lead organisation of the Cumbria Museum Consortium, an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation. As part of our Manifesto we strive to engage our local community at every level: we aim to provide a third space that anchors the community, using our stunning collections, which include our recently Designated Natural Science collection, to inspire our diverse audiences.

The Museum's Natural Science collection is Designated for a reason - it is a comprehensive, scientifically important and nationally significant collection of 300,000+ specimens that represent the flora and fauna of Cumbria, the most biodiverse county in the UK. Together with the 2m+ records held by the Cumbria Biodiversity Data Centre (CBDC - one of the oldest record centres in the world and located in Tullie House). This exciting new post represents an extraordinary opportunity to work within one of the most important natural science collections in the UK.

Tullie House and CBDC are committed to working together to raise the profile of biodiversity, nature and wildlife in Cumbria. CBDC has been based at Tullie House since 2010, but over the next year it will become more embedded within the Museum's structure, strategic priorities and vision.

This role is a fantastic opportunity to support this process and champion collections care and engagement. It is funded through Arts Council England's Designation Development Fund. The Project Assistant will support work to catalogue and digitise our designated geology and palaeontology collections and work with colleagues to deliver public outcomes and engagement relating to it. We are looking for a candidate with an interest in geology or museum collections, and who is keen to learn new skills.

The post would be responsible for supporting the Project Curator to document and digitise the geology and palaeontology collection, and to help to facilitate public engagement and other activities relating to the project. This is an entry level role, and so previous experience of working in a museum is not a requirement - we are looking for a candidate with an interest in geology or in gaining experience within a dynamic curatorial team.

Purpose of the Role

- Under the direction of the Project Curator, to document and digitise the geology collection to recognised professional standards, and to support increased access to this collection for research, engagement and income generation.
- To work with colleagues across the organisation - in particular the Cumbria Biodiversity Data Centre and Learning and Exhibition teams - to support the development of, and deliver, displays and events focusing on the geology collection in order to support the museum's Business Plan and the ambitious Project Tullie masterplan.

This post is fixed term (January 2021 - January 2023), 0.4FTE (2 days per week).

The North Pennines AONB Partnership is currently offering a training opportunity in geoheritage interpretation and education that would enable you to work with skilled professionals from our team and colleagues from partner organisations.

We are looking for a determined and enthusiastic Earth Science graduate who wants to develop their potential for a career in the geoheritage field.

The North Pennines AONB Partnership is the management body for the North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and UNESCO Global Geopark. We are currently offering a training opportunity in geoheritage interpretation and education that would enable you to work with skilled professionals from our team and colleagues from partner organisations.

We are looking for a determined and enthusiastic Earth Science graduate who wants to develop their potential for a career in the geoheritage field.

The work will be based in our office in Stanhope, Weardale and Bowlees Visitor Centre, Teesdale, County Durham and/or home working as necessary, but including travel across the whole area. This is a full time fixed-term post until October 2021, working a 37 hour week.

The successful candidate will be self-employed.

Bursary payments equate to the hourly rate of the living wage determined by Durham County Council, however, as it is a training payment, there are no sickness or holiday payments and it is not taxable.
Bursary payments will be made fortnightly in arrears on receipt of a timesheet and subject to satisfactory progress.
If successful, you will need to register as self-employed and obtain appropriate public liability insurance.

For an informal discussion about this opportunity please contact Naomi Foster: naomi@northpenninesaonb.org.uk, 07787 274671 or Simon Wilson: simon@northpenninesaonb.org.uk.

Further details about the AONB Partnership and the area can be found at www.northpennines.org.uk.
This opportunity is supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.