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What a busy day we had on the 17th September!

We took part in #Askacurator day, which has now become an annual fixture, alongside many other Museums, Galleries and Curators from around the world.

For those of you fond of figures, there were 721 different Museums from 43 countries that participated, and 47,546 tweets were sent by 13,000 different users.  It meant there were lots of conversations happening –  some were serious, others much more lighthearted.

The idea behind #askacurator is to promote interaction between museums and individuals as well as each other.

La Magnetica produced this rather interesting graph that shows visually some of this interaction.

Ask A Curator - Bradfordmuseums  compressed

For clarity, this graph shows the top 6% in the world – (any more in the image would have made it completely illegible), and we’re pleased to say that we’re in there – there’s a little red arrow pointing to us in the graph.

They’ve also produced an interesting blog post here, analysing statistics from the day.

We thought you might be interested in seeing a selection of the conversations we had over the day, although it’s by no means all of them!

We love them all, but:

‘Strange things’ questions are always popular.

Favourite items got a varied response too

A great question asked by @mardixon (who coordinates the day each year) gave us the chance to share what we’d love to find to add to the collection:

  That’s still true by the way –  if you know where that bed might be, we’d love you to get in touch.

Conversations we liked, but weren’t actively answering included one discussing the (theoretical) scientific explanation of why a dragon wouldn’t burn it’s mouth if it was breathing fire…  It did give us the chance to share this picture though.


For those wondering why there was a cuddly dragon handy, Drake had been attending the Teddy Bear’s picnic held this year at Cliffe Castle and was waiting for his owner to collect him!  ( he’s now safely back at home)

Great hilarity ensured from the sharing of ‘funny things asked’ in the museum, with some of the following gems:

We also got to share discoveries we’d made:

We enjoyed it so much both this year and last year that we’ve already signed up to take part in #Askacurator again in 2015.

We really hope you’ll join us on the 16th September next year with your questions -get those thinking caps to come up with some questions!

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