On the 18th September, alongside nearly 600 other museums and art galleries around the world, we took part in the international Ask a Curator day, where members of the public are encouraged to ask curators and museums the questions they’ve always wanted to know…
It could be as serious or as daft as people wanted to ask. All people needed to do to ask their question was either post it via the ask a curator website, or as the question on twitter with the hashtag #askacurator (the # symbol is called a hashtag, and by putting this in front of a topic, it allows users to track comments and replies that contain it. The questions could be aimed at specific museums or for all participating curators and museums to answer.
In the end, there were over 26,000 tweets sent over the 24 hours that it ran.
One question asked of all the participants that made us laugh was asking which Museum people would head for in the case of a Zombie Apocalypse. (One answer suggested was the National Museum of Scotland’s site in Edinburgh Castle, as it was both fortified, and had a selection of weaponry!)
We arranged for several of our curators to be available to answer questions as they came in and we thought you might enjoy seeing some of the resulting discussions.
Our Natural History Curator answered this one by @MsPenM
One of the sites the Museum service looks after is Bolling Hall. With the famous legend of the Bradford Ghost, wailing Pity Poor Bradford during the English Civil War, we had to answer this question, posed by @jockchick
And from ‘ghosties and ghoulies’ (although not lang-leggedy beasties this time) to things that just unnerve us, @lf crossley asked if there was anything in our collections that gave us the creeps.
We thoroughly enjoyed taking part in the day, and we look forward to doing so next year, but of course, you don’t have to wait that long to contact us if you have questions – contact details are available on the website if you have queries relating to the collections.
Or of course, you can tweet us, and we’ll point you in the right direction – our twitter ‘handle’ is @BradfordMuseums.
We look forward to hearing from you.