-
#AskACurator Wrap Up for 2019 – Quotes, Tweets and More
0
September 26th, 2019Culture
First, a huge thank you to everyone who took part and kept the spirit of #AskaCurator going for another year. I truly hope everyone had as much fun on #AskACurator Day as I did – it was really positive and active for 36 hours (thanks to New Zealand and Australia for always kicking things off and setting the fun, active tone for the day!).
I didn’t care much about the signups or countries because lets face it, they are just numbers that mean nothing. The real stats that matter is if people were happy and overall I received only one or two negative responses next to the 1000s of positives. (And yes, once again the tired conversation of ‘A curator isn’t the most important and this day doesn’t represent people who work in a museum’ was brought up again which my reply is – start your own hashtag. The @Askacurator name has been going for 9 years and everyone pretty much knows that they can talk to any staff and they do. I have worked the people behind @AskAnArchivst and @AskAnArcheologist to help build their days up as I would help anyone doing things for free.
Before I share a selection of topics and quotes, a friendly reminder that next year AskACurator will be on September 16 2020 and it’ll be the 10th anniversary! Also one last big thank you to Jim Richardson for trusting me with this campaign after he created it in 2010 and Jamie (@okayjamie) for creating the new logo and banner for the social media channels.
Quotes:
National Museum of American History @amhistorymuseum – #AskACurator day continues to be a popular and successful day at the National Museum of American History. One curators who answered questions wrote “This is always one of my favorite days to be a curator.” We reached significantly more people on Twitter than our usual audience, one of the highest performing days in the quarter.
Cincy Museum @CincyMuseum Thanks again for another wonderful #AskACurator Day! @CincyMuseum once again had a blast and some of our highlights included: We featured 5 different Curator teams, did a Facebook LIVE video, posted to FB, TW, IG, Snapchat and had a total reach over all platforms of 52.9K! Our Top Tweet was one of us packing up a Mastodon skeleton for a future permanent exhibition:
The rest of the post is a variety of Questions:
Have you ever broken anything?
Pinned to AskACurator
Tough question:
Question asked to a lot of museums:
Unloved objects
Guess the object/Find the object
Museums Not Neutral
Queer history
Cake
Collection to Epcot
Podcast:
Finding an object
Squirrel
Emotions in collection
Where to work
Cuteness
What does your desk look like?
Artifact come to life
Is there a museum or curator whose work you admire?
Zombie attack
Weirdest thing you’ve done
Tattoo
Moment
The Day after
And finally we can’t forget ALL the Instagram stories and sharing which were amazing. There is a highlight story on @AskACurator Instagram account to show *some* of the ones shared (it was really hard to keep up!) and this little video to show a snippet of the #AskACurator hashtag.
Finally, mark your calendars for September 16 2020 for the next #AskACurator – and it’ll be the 10th anniversary!
