WPI: final presentation
In our penultimate week at the British Museum we were busy pulling together all of our research and wanted to share with you the subject matter which will be covered in our final report…
Through previous analysis of the network, the ITP team had noticed that definitions of job titles varied greatly across different countries and institutions in the ITP network. One of our tasks has been to look closely at the responsibilities of museum professionals within the network to determine where their expertise lie so that the ITP team can better meet their needs.
An interesting trend that we have analyzed is the increasingly unbalanced gender ratio amongst fellows, largely driven by the majority female participation in recent summer programmes. To support this work we looked at gender ratio across the museum sector and training programmes within the sector and found there to be consistently more women than men. We have also surveyed the ITP allumni, asking how they perceive the gender balance to be in entry and management role; based on our responses so far, it has been interesting to hear that these roles are largely equally divided between men and women.
The ITP team expressed that they would like to find better ways of communicating with fellows from China. The ITP blog and Facebook page are successful modes of communication for the network, but Chinese Fellows cannot access these pages. Our research identified the Chinese social media platforms, WeChat, and Weibo, as alternatives to Facebook and WordPress. Our group identified, after researching and attending a Chinese marketing presentation, that WeChat is the most comparable platform to those the ITP currently uses. WeChat is best described as a mixture of Facebook and WhatsApp in terms of posting and group messages.
We have heard lots of interesting facts through our interviews and emails with fellows of the ITP. We had a wonderful time interviewing members and we are happy that many of you have had a chance to review the biographies that we’ve been sending out. In some of your interviews, you mentioned that you would like to view our final report, which will be posted on our university website and shared with you via the ITP team.
Out of all of our experiences we each have different highlights. Ryan enjoyed being behind the scenes of the museum and seeing how museums are connected across the world. Jessica enjoyed getting to know fellows through phone calls and emails, as did Ed. Sarah liked how working in a museum has changed the way she will visit museums in future – now she takes more notice of the display, the labels, the public programming…
Thank you to everyone who spoke to us, answered our emails and filled out surveys, contributing to our project!
Ed, Jessica, Ryan and Sarah
