by Michelle Slater
The British Museum is a world renowned institution known for its rich history of collecting antiquities and priceless works of art from around the world. The Museum is open year-round for free to visitors in London, but recognizes that visiting in person is limiting to the many more people they wish to reach. While they are known for their strict access and photography policy upon visiting the museum, they do make many efforts to share their collections digitally, through controlled marketing and outreach programs. The British Museum has made it a part of their mission to reach more of the general public, and has implemented several new outreach projects using digital and virtual programming.
One way the Museum is bringing light to its collections and internal practices is through “Curator’s Corner,” a youtube series hosted on the British Museum’s youtube channel. Each episode is an intimate encounter with an exceptional or bizarre selection from the Museum’s collection. The series is designed to peak interest on niche objects and topics, focusing on particularly interesting or rare objects in the Museum’s collection, and items that may not be on display as they undergo restoration.
The “Curator’s Corner” series highlights the different departments and staff who care for and interact with the collections on a daily basis, creating transparency around the many studies and ongoing practices at the British Museum being conducted behind closed doors. Every episode is guided by speaker whose occupation varies from topic to topic, and runs the gamete of museum professionals including subject specialists, department curators, scientists, researchers, and more. The episode’s host often reports directly from their office, the gallery floor, the archive stacks, or scientific labs to show the wide range of work being done throughout the Museum, and to give viewers a look inside their workspaces- a site that the average visitor would never see.
Each episode runs between five to ten minutes, and there is a total of twenty-five episodes in the series to date, spanning three seasons. Topics range from ‘the effects of light on works of art’ to ‘depictions of ancient demons.’ “Curator’s Corner” draws in viewers with topics so varied that it is impossible to gloss them over. Items from the Museum’s collection are discussed in-depth using plain language, so that the average viewer can relate to and understand the themes discussed.
The “Curator’s Corner” video series is shared across the Museum’s social media accounts and blog. While every blog post includes an episode of “Curator’s Corner” linked from youtube, not every episode has a coinciding blog post- which tend to be more illustrative with multiple pictures and blocks of scholarly text about the featured topic. In this way, the blog is a further resource for select topics covered in “Curator’s Corner.” With over 81k subscribers on youtube, episodes range in views from week to week, some reaching upwards of 112k views. As the series progresses, “Curator’s Corner” is able to reach a wider, disparate group of viewers with engaging and unique programming, elevating the public interest and knowledge in the collections held by the British Museum.