My Placement at The John Moore Museum

By Shuhua Qin

 

Time flies. My placement at the John Moore Museum is coming to the end. It’s really been a good experience. I will definitely miss this time in the future.

 

First of all, I would like to share my first impression of the museum. Before I came to this museum, I already researched these historic cottages and the three fantastic locations of the museum. But when I have truly been here and visited every space carefully, I was still amazed. Despite the museum’s small size, there are numerous surprises to be found if you look carefully. For example, a small piece of primitive wall next to the museum reception, the ancient stairs in the Merchant’s House, the items in the education box for tourists to explore, and so on. There are also two lovely gardens. The tour here will never be boring.

 

Next, let me talk about my work. The placement at the museum was very interesting and varied. I am very grateful to the museum staff. Thanks to their help, I was able to get in touch with so many different kinds of work.

 

 

The summer activities program was the longest task that I participated in, which lasted for five weeks. Through different activities, I found there is a difference between the indoor and outdoor activities, which prompted me to think about which aspects I should pay attention to in organizing different activities in my future work. Although I still need to build more confidence in communicating with visitors, and gain more practice talking to children, I still enjoyed these activities.

 

The most challenging task I thought was the inventory of the Merchant’s House and the Old Baptist Chapel (OBC). I never noticed that there were so many things in these places. Checking items sometimes made me feel dizzy as some things were not in the correct place, and I needed to record all the changes. Besides, the names of some items are totally new to me, especially the weird and varied names of the spoons. It was a challenge to recognize them. However, it was a good opportunity for me to learn more about the objects within the Merchant’s House and the OBC. Without this work, I might never have known they had so many wonderful things to discover. Moreover, checking inventories let me learn more about historical objects, which helped me gain a better understanding of how people lived in the past.

 

 

The most exciting task, I thought, was inspecting the natural history collections. It is a task to see whether there are any pests on the taxidermy that need to be removed. This was an excellent chance for me to see these exhibits up close, which I had never experienced before.

 

 

Finally, I found communicating with the volunteers really enjoyable, and I can learn a lot from them. The museum has a good team of volunteers who are all very warm and friendly. Volunteers are extremely important to the museum. I am always be moved by their enthusiasm. It always makes me reflect on myself whether I will be able to have the same enthusiasm to face my future work.

 

Although the museum provides some training and materials, volunteers are encouraged to develop their own interests. Each volunteer has different interpretation styles and contents, which, I believe, is the key to making the museum trip so enjoyable. Speaking with individuals is always more vivid, interesting and profound than just looking at the explanations on the wall. For tourists, they can learn more information, while volunteers can also improve their language expression ability and obtain more satisfaction through visitor service. I have also had the honour to try to do some guiding in the Merchant’s House. When I receive a positive response from the visitors, I can always feel a sense of satisfaction. It also encourages me to study further, so that I can share more knowledge.

 

 

I also experienced many other tasks, including environmental and pest monitoring, learning social media operations, doing visitor service at the reception desk and archiving collections. It was a meaningful learning experience at the John Moore Museum. It is a fantastic place for museum students who have no idea about their future career orientation, since they can experience a wide variety of museum tasks and discover what their future career interests might be.

 

Click on the link to watch my short video on the Eurasian Jay within the museum’s Natural History Collection. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ejz0Q3IRPos