Happy New Year

Happy New Year to everyone.

I'm going to try to post more often to the blog and hopefully encourage others to do the same. I was supposed to be having a couple of weeks off from museum stuff but, me being me, I was still doing bits and pieces at home.

Its been an eventful few weeks. Mark Macleod, our Project Development Officer has gone to pastures new. He is now working at the Scottish Museums Council as their Membership Development Officer. They say no one is indispensable but Mark is the exception to the rule - we're going to miss him very much. However he has created a lot of local goodwill for the museum and has given us many great ideas to build upon. To cap it all, Kirsty Conti who was Maternity Cover for the Outreach and Interpretation post has also handed in her resignation and will be gone in a couple of weeks. How will all this affect the Friends?

Well, Reg the Chairman of the Project Management Committee and myself are going to meet with Alasdair Joyce, Senior Museums Officer and Alistair Campbell, Libraries and Museums Manager next week to see how the Friends can assist the Museums service this year and also to suggest how they can make things easier for us.

Some of the plans I came up with for this year (and possibly next) are:-
Tour Guides, Tee Shirt Printing, Card Making, Dry Mounting labels for display cases, digitising slides, researching the local "closes", interpretation for the newly restored Falconer Painting, taking on the museum e-newsletter, doing talks to local groups, more temporary exhibitions and of course recording more oral history conversations and podcasts.

Speaking of Podcasts, I've had great trouble trying to get iTunes to recognise an enhanced podcast. Turns out blogger doesnt have the correct mime type for m4a files. I've put these files onto Podbean but so far iTunes still havent updated the Podcast. I'm very keen to move to enhanced podcasts as it gives me the ability to include pictures with the podcast. This means we could be doing podcasts for specific objects and show pictures of them. Meanwhile if you want to subscribe to the new rss feed here is the url:-

www.falconerfriends.podbean.com/feed


Now I'm off to get to grips with the spreadsheet for the volunteer timesheets. In a moment of weakness I agreed to take this on. Mark designed a large spreadsheet for this so I'll have to learn how it works. Its important we have a note of volunteer hours as an hour of volunteer time is worth £15 to the redevelopment project.

Chris - Volunteer Coordinator