Hello!

Has it been a month already? It’s been a busy one for us here at The Museum Platform, with a summit in Sheffield to plan new features and get ready for the launch of version 5 of TMP. You’ll be hearing a lot more about this very soon. In the meantime, here’s some news and other interesting things from us. Enjoy!

Any questions? Drop us a line!

Floating out: P&O Heritage

We smashed a bottle of champagne against the side of this one just before Christmas: a whole new-look site for the history and collections of the venerable British shipping company.

Branded look and feel? Yep. Collections at the heart of the site? As always! Built-in storytelling? But of course. Maritime history turns out to be a fascinating kind of social history too. Maybe you have one of P&O’s ten pound poms in your family?

A fun thing we did when building this site: we had fact sheets for over 2000 ships, but they were locked up in PDFs. We used ChatGPT to convert them to structured data. Now you can search and find records for individual ships like CANBERRA in the P&O Heritage data. We’d love to do more of this sort of thing.

In the works: documentation where you need it

We recently had a get-together in Sheffield, to prepare for the launch of version 5 of The Museum Platform… watch this space for further news!

As part of the new version, we’re tackling documentation in a big way. We know that we’re currently lacking robust documentation for much of what TMP does, and we want to make sure that we get it right, you know where to find it, and that what we provide is top-notch.

So we’re completely rewriting the Hub where we keep our documentation, and for version 5, we’ll also be building a new set of prompts right into the platform itself. So when you’re using a tool or a block and you need some help, it’ll be right there for you, with the option to hop over to the documentation site itself when you need more.

Telling tales: Strike songs at Hackney Museum

We love nothing more than seeing TMP used to deliver compelling stories about museum collections. Hackney Museum are leaping ahead using the site we built to tell richly illustrated stories about the history of the East End.

If you have five minutes free, dive into this story of the singing garment workers who led strikes at Hackney’s Rego and Polikoff garment factories and formed a breakaway union led by the ‘red agitators’ Sara Wesker and Sam Elsbury.

A thing we like: Two Point Museum

There’s been a big buzz about this new museum sim with an almost-familiar acronym. We’re far too busy making websites for museums to play games about museums, so we hand you over over to our guest reviewer, game nerd Sacha Ottevanger:

A relaxing and enjoyable management game in which you own and run museums and aquariums. You can send staff on expeditions to collect specimens: anything from a frozen fridge to a Sharpontops dinosaur. The rarity and quality of your exhibits affects guests’ opinions of the objects on display, and your overall score.

Visitors bring their own personalities and jobs, whether professors only interested in education, or playful children who will refuse to read any of the information provided (so you’ll need to create educational entertainment for them).

Overall: a high quality management game with lots of game mechanics to be learned. I can’t wait to dig into TPM further!

From the collections: Feeling sketchy?

When you’re using our collections search, sometimes you need to hone in on a single object and find out as much as you can about it. At other times you just want to browse through what’s there and see what catches your fancy. 

We say: why not do both? And looking through these sketches in the collection at Torre Abbey is like being able to leaf through an artist’s own sketchbook. Tiny studies of life, quickly caught by the artist’s eye and pencil. Beautiful!

Bye!

Thanks for sticking with us to the end of another newsletter. Before next month’s rolls around, we’d love to know what you thought of this one, or just to hear where you’d like to go next with TMP.

Until next time,

Mike, Jeremy and the TMP team.