Hello!

Summer’s over! Whether you were on the beach or catching up on your backlogs, we hope you had a good one and some autumn cosiness is in store. We’re busy putting the finishing touches to version 5 of TMP, and starting one or two other projects.

Read on for the details. And as always, if anything sparks an idea or an ambition for what you’d like to do with your site or collections, say hi!

🗎 Documentation for the TMP nation

Screenshot: TMP

Back in March we wrote about our plans to integrate help and documentation right into the fabric of The Museum Platform.

We’ll always have the Hub, where you can find documentation, but TMP version 5 will now have the same help pages baked into your own dashboard, and also into user-friendly pop-ups you can access when you’re building pages.

We’ve worked with Danny Birchall to rewrite the help text from scratch. Under the hood, it’s all wired up, so updates to the hub automatically flow through to your own site. This should give everyone, from new clients to old hands, the help you need at the point that you need it.

Screenshot: TMP

💭 In the mood (board)

Screenshot: TMP

We’ve just started working with Fashion Museum Bath on a prototype interface for their collections. We love making prototypes: it’s a chance to experiment with new ideas that we’ve been pushing around.

One of these is a ‘mood board’: an interface that allows users to find items in the collection and then drop them straight onto a free-form whiteboard of exactly the kind that fashion designers use for inspiration.

Would that suit your collection? If it puts you in the mood, get in touch and we can think about how it might work for you.

🐚 A word in your shell-like?

Screenshot: RAMM

The collections at Exeter’s RAMM are full of great stories, and we love the way they tell them. This story about George Montagu’s incredible collection of mollusc shells is full of engrossing detail.

It’s one of RAMM’s longer stories, and they make great use of our Museum Blocks to make the content navigable and easily digestible. Accordions, carousels and embedded object records all provide usable ways into the wealth of the collection.

🎨 Pause for thought: Blended museums

Captain Kidd’s Cannon QRpedia
by The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis on Flickr

What is a ‘blended museum’ experience? Mike has been thinking about this one for a long time. Can we use mobile devices to bring digital features to gallery experiences?

QR codes are a starting point to picking up extra content, and we’re developing tools to create and track these.

But can we also make tools for users to virtually ‘collect’ the things they see in a gallery, dive into an audio guide, or read an approved translation of a gallery label? How can digital content enhance rather than detract from the ‘here and now’ of a museum visit?

We’re working on prototypes (told you we liked them!) – let us know if you’re interested.

⚔️ From the collections: Viking Invasion!

Screenshot: NMD Museums

When you think of Northern Ireland in the 1960s, Vikings might not be the first thing that comes to mind. But the Newry and Mourne Museum have evidence that broadswords and helmets were once all the rage in County Down. Our curiosity was piqued and we even found film of the events….

Thank you!

Thanks for reading all the way to the end. 

If anything here has inspired you, or you just want to chat about what we can do together, then please get in touch!

Until then,

Mike, Jeremy and the TMP team.