Museums are dusting off their mikes and starting to make more use of podcasts, a flexible but underused resource. Podcasts are an informal and intimate medium, and can be effective in engaging audiences.
Museums offer lots of subject choice when it comes to this medium. The British Museum in London has everything from A History of the World in 100 Objects to the story of the stray cats that lived on site in the 1960s. Royal Museums Greenwich offers curators’ podcasts, with sound effects and music, on topics from time and space to shipwrecks.
The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London also has a range of podcasts on its website. These include Victoria Broackes, from the museum’s theatre and performance department, and the music critic Paul Morley discussing the challenges of presenting rock and pop music in a museum setting. The pair examine how to bring alive displays of pop and rock material using multiple technologies, as seen in the V&A’s hit exhibition David Bowie Is in 2013, and what the future of curating music holds.
Other venues, such as the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, provide straightforward, unedited recordings of lectures. And Headstone Manor & Museum in Harrow (see p52) has created a podcast that takes a closer look at its recent restoration project.
Smaller museums can also piggyback on the podcasts of others. Dorset’s Tank Museum, for example, makes its own oral-history podcasts with world war two veterans, but it has also made podcasts for popular series that have hundreds of thousands of followers, such as Dan Snow’s History Hit and the Great War Channel.
In Wales, Wrexham County Borough Museum & Archives used Podcast Pêl-droed, a community football podcast founded by the Cardiff-based producer and trainer Russell Todd, to talk about the Welsh football collection.
“This gives a flavour of what the medium can do to raise the profile of something like this collection, which isn’t the subject of a permanent display,” says Todd, who trains organisations to set up and run podcasts on a shoestring. “The key is to remove the science and techie elements, and consider podcasting from the point of view of sector learning. Acquiring new skills and sharing good practice can make it more justifiable to managers, funders and trustees.”
The Freud Museum in London has been podcasting its lectures and interviews since 2011. They cover specialised psychoanalytical material as well as more accessible subject matter. The podcasts are hosted by a service called Podbean, which costs around £200 a year, and are being embedded into the museum’s new website.
“It’s now easier to embed podcasts on a website or blog and we have a digital volunteer who helps us with that,” says Stefan Marianski, the education and digital officer at the Freud Museum. Half of the venue’s visitors are from overseas and the podcasts are a way for them to access content in their home countries.
“They will be more accessible when they are an integral part of the website and we can monitor how much traffic is driven by them,” Marianski says. “Our most popular podcast had 8,500 downloads, though we average around 1,300 per podcast. That can double after a popular talk or event, so we can tell that people are accessing our events through podcasts. It all strengthens our reputation.”
Some small venues may be reluctant to podcast events, fearing people will be less inclined to pay to attend if they know they can listen to it later for free. But Marianski has found the opposite to be true.
“If anything, it raises awareness of our lively events programme,” he says. “With the proliferation of audio-editing tools, podcasts are easy to create, and for small museums in particular, they are democratising. It’s a winning formula.”
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance writer
Museums offer lots of subject choice when it comes to this medium. The British Museum in London has everything from A History of the World in 100 Objects to the story of the stray cats that lived on site in the 1960s. Royal Museums Greenwich offers curators’ podcasts, with sound effects and music, on topics from time and space to shipwrecks.
The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London also has a range of podcasts on its website. These include Victoria Broackes, from the museum’s theatre and performance department, and the music critic Paul Morley discussing the challenges of presenting rock and pop music in a museum setting. The pair examine how to bring alive displays of pop and rock material using multiple technologies, as seen in the V&A’s hit exhibition David Bowie Is in 2013, and what the future of curating music holds.
Other venues, such as the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, provide straightforward, unedited recordings of lectures. And Headstone Manor & Museum in Harrow (see p52) has created a podcast that takes a closer look at its recent restoration project.
Smaller museums can also piggyback on the podcasts of others. Dorset’s Tank Museum, for example, makes its own oral-history podcasts with world war two veterans, but it has also made podcasts for popular series that have hundreds of thousands of followers, such as Dan Snow’s History Hit and the Great War Channel.
In Wales, Wrexham County Borough Museum & Archives used Podcast Pêl-droed, a community football podcast founded by the Cardiff-based producer and trainer Russell Todd, to talk about the Welsh football collection.
“This gives a flavour of what the medium can do to raise the profile of something like this collection, which isn’t the subject of a permanent display,” says Todd, who trains organisations to set up and run podcasts on a shoestring. “The key is to remove the science and techie elements, and consider podcasting from the point of view of sector learning. Acquiring new skills and sharing good practice can make it more justifiable to managers, funders and trustees.”
The Freud Museum in London has been podcasting its lectures and interviews since 2011. They cover specialised psychoanalytical material as well as more accessible subject matter. The podcasts are hosted by a service called Podbean, which costs around £200 a year, and are being embedded into the museum’s new website.
“It’s now easier to embed podcasts on a website or blog and we have a digital volunteer who helps us with that,” says Stefan Marianski, the education and digital officer at the Freud Museum. Half of the venue’s visitors are from overseas and the podcasts are a way for them to access content in their home countries.
“They will be more accessible when they are an integral part of the website and we can monitor how much traffic is driven by them,” Marianski says. “Our most popular podcast had 8,500 downloads, though we average around 1,300 per podcast. That can double after a popular talk or event, so we can tell that people are accessing our events through podcasts. It all strengthens our reputation.”
Some small venues may be reluctant to podcast events, fearing people will be less inclined to pay to attend if they know they can listen to it later for free. But Marianski has found the opposite to be true.
“If anything, it raises awareness of our lively events programme,” he says. “With the proliferation of audio-editing tools, podcasts are easy to create, and for small museums in particular, they are democratising. It’s a winning formula.”
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance writer