General

For the last five years St Fagans National History Museum has been a partner in the EU Culture-funded project, OpenArch.

OpenArch is an exciting project which aims to raises standards of management, interpretation and visitor interaction in those open-air museums that focus on Europe’s early history – archaeological open-air museums (AOAMs) as they have become known. AOAMs can be found right across Europe, bringing to life everything from Stone Age campsites to Iron Age farms, Roman forts and medieval towns. Their great strength is in the way in which they present their stories, often through detailed reconstructions and live interpretation.

The partners in this project are:

Archaeological-Ecological Centre Albersdorf, Germany

Archeon, Netherlands

C.I. De Calafell, Catalonia

EXARC, Netherlands

Exeter University, UK

Fotevikens Museum, Sweden

Hunebedcentrum, Netherlands

Kierikki Stone Age Village, Finland

Parco Archeologico e Museo all’aperto della Terramara di Montale, Italy

Viminacium, Serbia

And, of course, St Fagans National History Museum.

The project itself consists of three main strands: conferences and workshops, staff exchanges, and activities.

OpenArch meeting in a reconstructed Bronze Age house in Modena, Italy

Almost all the partners have hosted conferences related to the main area they are covering in the project: management practices, visitor interaction, craft work, scientific studies and communication, among others. Many of these have attracted large audiences and all have been stimulating opportunities to share new ideas.

Staff exchanges have also been a key method of strengthening links between the partner organisations, with practitioners spending time working in one another’s institutions to help share best practice.

The activities that partners have undertaken have, of course, been very varied. For example, visitor surveys have been undertaken to help us understand how well we are serving the public, and scientific studies have been carried out to learn more about how life was lived in the past and how this can be shown to the public.

What has St Fagans done?

St Fagans has benefited tremendously from the project. Over the course of the last five years, around twenty members of staff from all parts of the Museum have had the opportunity to see how their colleagues in other museums go about their work. It’s been a chance to share what we do well, and learn from others. On one exchange visit, staff from our Events team were able to see how public activities were organized by our partners at Archeon in the Netherlands. On another, our Iron Age learning facilitator helped out on an Iron Age themed event in Calafell, Spain. The experience has certainly given us a better appreciation of the benefits of European working and has helped us to develop further ideas for collaborative working with European partners.

Throughout the project we have been using the experience we’ve gained in OpenArch to improve the quality of the new Iron Age farmhouses we’ve been building. For example, we learnt from the very high standards of interior display demonstrated by our colleagues in Modena in Italy and adopted their standards in the choice of display items; while the work of the Hunebedcentrum in the Netherlands helped in suggesting ways that we could improve our building maintenance programmes. Along the way we’ve shared what we’ve learnt and how we’ve applied it in presentations at conferences run by the partners.

Perhaps the high point of our involvement in the project was the conference that we ran in May 2015. We used this to focus the project on issues relating to the management of archaeological open-air museums, and over three days we looked at issues both theoretical and practical in the company of a very distinguished selection of speakers from across Europe.

Alongside the conference we ran a craft festival as a major public event – the first of its kind to be held at St Fagans in many years. Over the course of a packed day, we hosted around 50 craftspeople from across Wales and the UK, including colleagues from our partner museums who were with us on staff exchange. Together they put on a great show, demonstrating everything from metalworking to pot-making, leatherwork, painting, food preparation and lots more. Over 5,000 visitors came to visit and feedback was excellent.

More information about our involvement in OpenArch can be found on the project website: openarch.eu.

The OpenArch partners meeting outside Bryn Eryr, our new roundhouses in May 2015.

This is a short introduction to one of the Archive collections held at St Fagans: National History Museum. The Paper archive consists of 35,000 items relating to Welsh Social and Cultural History.

Whose story does it tell?

This archive gives us a picture of people's everyday lives in Wales during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries and up to the present day.

What does it contain?

It contains among other items diaries; letters; trade account books; memoirs; linguistic studies; local history and folklore; traditional recipes; notes on traditional medicines; records of traditional buildings; agricultural records; educational and school records and a large collection of folk music.

A Recent Donation – Letters written by Ffransis Payne between 1935-1936

Ffransis Payne was Keeper of Collections at the Welsh Folk Museum (now known as St Fagans: National History Museum) and worked alongside Dr. Iorwerth Peate. Recently, his son Ceri Payne collated and then donated to the Archive extracts of letters, his father sent to his mother before they married in the period 1935 to 1936.

Ffransis was born in Kington in Herefordshire and previously worked as a farm hand in Cardiganshire, Monmouthshire and Glamorganshire. He also worked in the steelworks of Ebbw Vale, in the rail yards of Neath, as a clerk in Glasgow and as a book seller back in Cardiganshire.

He became an Archivist in Swansea in 1934 and was then appointed Assistant in the Department of Folk Culture and Industries at National Museum Cardiff in 1936.

In his letters to his future wife Helly Bilek, a 19 year old from Austria, he discusses international events (the rising tensions on the continent pre Second World War); Welsh political problems (a clash between unemployed workers and the Welsh National Party in May 1936 during the Pwllheli Annual Fair, regarding the Government's proposal to build a new air base and bombing school at Porth Neigwl) and a comment from his friend Saunders Lewis on the event.

The letters also contain comments about his work at the Museum and items collected and researched by him, and finally domestic observations about living and working in Cardiff during this period.

Wednesday, 15th of April, 1936 - I have just been listening to the news on the wireless. The situation in Austria is serious, it was said, and frontier troop movements etc. .......there is a month for us to see what will happen...

Western Mail, Monday May 25th,1936 - "Fight at Welsh Air Base Protest Meeting, Nationalist Party Leaders Clash with Unemployed"

Tuesday, 26th May, 1936 - I had a talk with Saunders Lewis today. He says the newspaper report exaggerated. He certainly seems unruffled.

Tuesday, 30th June, 1936 - My first real job has been assigned to me, it is making a catalogue and guide to the Museum's collection of samplers!!

Sunday, 5th July, 1936 - As for my work at the museum. I was and am quite serious. If you are interested in people and ways of life, you will find plenty to interest you in my work.

This is a void appreciation post.

It's not often that we have a lot of time to reflect on what we do, because there's always so much to do. So, before I jump into venue hire revamps; finishing off a piece of prep for this Women's Archive Wales conference and helping with new 'suggest an event' pages, let's look into the murky abyss and just take a minute to breathe.

Nice, no? [The Sea's Edge, Arthur Giardelli]

Since 'keeping busy' is the other Welsh national sport, it's not for everyone - but I'm a firm believer in taking stock, staying still for a minute, and listening. There'll always be a call: an email that's fallen down the back of the sofa, a book you've been meaning to pick up, or a colleague you'd like to make more time for will pop upstairs and say hi.

Evaluation and Taking Stock

We're in transition as a department - welcoming two new team members this week - and have been working, quite separately and like the clappers recently, on various projects, on web, galleries, social, governance, research and planning.

Graham, who heads the Content Team (and who I will now be calling Captain Content if he lets me), has been taking part in a cross-sector project looking at evaluation and taking stock, called Let's Get Real. Last week, he braved their Crit Room in Brighton, where he presented our work for open criticism and questioning. Curiously scary.

The results of the crit have been a real encouragement - I had been worrying about the size of our twitter network, since the time cost of keeping everyone trained up is ever growing for me. But, we were encouraged to see it as a sign that we're a healthy, tweeting organisation.

I am really trying to believe them.

Feedback from the Crit Room

Self-deprecation aside, I'm quietly happy with how we're working as a network, and really chuffed to see people really run with the new skills they've acquired on social media. In fact, while totting up some numbers for an unrelated report last week I saw we'd passed a great milestone - as a network, we now have over 125,000 followers on twitter alone. I know it's not just a numbers game, but there's something reassuring about those great, neat, empty 000s in a row.

The Crit Room also had great words of encouragement for Chris, who's built all the foundation for the website redesign (and much more besides), and the rest of the team - namely that our digital offer was 'highly rewarding, rich and satisfying'. I can't stop thinking of coffee when I read those words. Speaking of which: time to stop blogging about stopping now, and start stopping for a cuppa.

A Radical Collection

I'm content when I'm rummaging through old records, photographs or documents. Gleaning through 'stuff' is an unusual pleasure now that I work in the Digital dept, my day-to-day work mostly bereft of bits of paper.

I love the feel of ruffling through collections; whether it's a pile of vinyl, a card catalogue, or a box of old letters and tickets from the last century (it's scary to say that: "I went to a Levellers gig in the last century".)

Nearest and dearest to me are the Screen and Sound Archive at the National Library (where my Father worked until his retirement), and the Archives at St Fagans National History Museum. At St Fagans, the history of those early, radical curators, the background noises they capture, the dialects and the voices have had me in awe for almost a decade now.

It's also a relatively egalitarian collection, that notes the value of women's histories and makes space for us to tell our stories in our own words, to share our songs, recipes, beliefs and superstitions. Paper history doesn't match up somehow, where our voices oftentimes get squished to the margins and footnotes. It must be said that it isn't a completely intersectional collection, though efforts have been made in recent years to address this, for example, in recording stories from LGBT people.

My Grandmother's Voice

I will never forget finding my Grandmother's voice in the archive. She died when I was very young and so I don't remember very much about her, apart from what I've picked up from photos and from her poetry.

My Grandmother in 1926 © R I Hughes

She was an excellent storyteller, and it was a privilege to receive a CD of her telling a few tales. Her voice had been there, kept safe all along - and I was bowled over, not just by her turn of phrase and sense of humour, but by the noises my Grandfather was making in the background as he tinkered around. His voice was not as deep as the one I'd committed to memory, and unlocked a drawerfull of memories besides.

This encounter further convinced me that archives deserve to be recognised as inherently meaningful collections, to be treated not as a supporting cast, but as whole collections which deserve pride of place alongside archaeological objects and artwork in our museums.

The Archive Today

I've been working with the team for a while - Richard (@archifSFarchive) who is part of the @DyddiadurKate team, and now with Lowri and Meinwen, who look after the manuscripts and sound archive. I've been showing them how to use our blogging platform, so hopefully we'll see a bit more of the life of those collections online soon. 

Within the digital department, we're busy revamping our pages on Welsh traditions and folksongs. While that work is going on, I've been looking in more detail at how we could potentially reach a wider audience by sharing sound clips on social platforms.

Sharing Sound Socially

The platforms we currently run - twitter, facebook and tumblr - seemed too ephemeral somehow.

Tweets don't live long enough, especially since we have so many accounts running in St Fagans; and the data shows us that our facebook fans are more interested in our events programme than our collections. Something as focussed as oral history or folk music could easily get lost or miss its mark.

So, I asked Gareth and Rhodri about their experiences of sharing music on soundcloud, bandcamp etc. I decided to create a package our of existing digitised material using bandcamp, and to release them all in one go, father than drip-feed them on the blog or on twitter.

One of the lovely things about bandcamp is the ability to add more information, like sheet music, lyrics and the history of the recording, and that I'm able to package things in an 'album' style. I was also really keen to use the 'pay if you like' function to see if we could open up a small donations stream that could be evaluated in the future.

Download 'O'r Archif'

Here it is then, a selection of folk songs, recorded from 1960 onwards by our archive at St Fagans: O'r Archif: Caneuon Gwerin

Most of the recordings were made by Roy Saer. The sheet music and sound was arranged by Meinwen Ruddock-Jones in the archive, and additional research carried out by Emma Lile. The cover for the collection is held in our art department, and is attributed to the travelling artist W J Champan.

I used Canva to tie together the older scans of the sheet music, and to add a word or two about the archive's history. If there are any errors, therefore, they are mine! Enjoy, share, sing, donate and experiment - and if you have any feedback, please pop it in the comments!

Dwi'n edrych ymlaen at ein digwyddiad sgyrsiau fflach yfory - cyfle i staff o wahanol adrannau gyflwyo eu hymchwil mewn pum munud.

O ystyried amrywiaeth y disgyblaethau a'r arbenigedd sy'n bodoli 'ma (o ddaeareg gynnar i gelf modern, gofalu am esgyrn i dynnu llo...), dwi'n disgwyl dysgu rhywbeth, a'n gobeithio rhannu arfer da.

Pum Munud i Drafod Dyddiadur

Fe fydda i'n cyflwyno pum munud am @DyddiadurKate - er fod calon ymchwilydd gen i, y tîm yn Sain Ffagan sydd wedi bod yn dod â hanes Kate a'i chynefin at gynulleidfa newydd. Yn aml fe fydda i'n ymladd fy ngreddf i ymgolli mewn casgliadau a'n atgoffa fy hun mai pen hwylusydd sydd gen i - a mai fy rôl innau yw i greu gofod ar gyfer y tîm, eu hannog, a rhannu eu gwaith da ymhellach. 

Model Rhannu Casgliadau

Dwi wedi fy argyhoeddi fod model @DyddiadurKate yn un y gellir ei ddyblygu i rannu casgliadau eraill - yn enwedig y gwrthrychau cynnil hynny na fydd byth yn ennill teitl fel 'trysor' neu 'eicon'. Ond ofer fyddai mentro'r un peth eto heb ymroddiad tîm, a'r holl gynnwys cefnogol sydd gennym ar flaenau'n bysedd. 

O gronfa ddata casgliadau'r Rhyfel Mawr, i adnoddau allanol fel Papurau Newydd Cymru - a mewnbwn ein cynulleidfa - mae'r dyddiadur wedi bod yn sbringfwrdd i straeon amrywiol iawn am Gymru, a thu hwnt, gan mlynedd yn ôl.

Technoleg Gefnogol

O ran stwff nyrdlyd, technolegol, mae arferion rhannu asedau da wedi helpu, yn ogystal â phlatfform rhag-bostio, er mwyn rhyddhau'r curaduron o'r dasg ddyddiol o bostio, i greu amser iddyn nhw afael mewn pynciau perthnasol a'u hymchwilio ar gyfer y blog, neu greu cysylltiadau efo casgliadau eraill.

Y Rhife

Hyd yn hyn, mae dros 207,000 o argraffiadau wedi'u cofnodi ar y cyfri - llawer iawn mwy nag y gallen ni ei hwyluso yn gofforol, a mwy nag y gallai'r ddogfen ei ddioddef, yn gorffol, hefyd. Mae'r prosiect wedi codi traffig i flog Cymraeg yr Amgueddfa dros 800% o'i gymharu â llynedd - sy'n fy argyhoeddi mhellach o bwysigrwydd creu cynnwys gwreiddiol ar gyfer siaradwyr Cymraeg y we, i ateb galw go iawn, ac i greu cysylltiadau rhithiol ar hyd a lled y wlad, o'n swyddfa fach y tu ôl' i'r orielau celf.