24 Hour Museum
Britain’s National Virtual Museum
PO Box 3470
Brighton
BN1 1DA

03/03/2004 - PRESS RELEASE - FOR IMMMEDIATE USE

24 Hour Museum Announces City Heritage Guides

Click here to visit our new City Heritage Guides section

The 24 Hour Museum is set to launch a series of web guides to the museums, galleries and heritage of 10 English cities. Scheduled to go live in August 2004, the non-commercial mini websites promise more than traditional tourism sites.

"Analysis of how our users search the site shows they look for city-based content", explains Jane Finnis, 24 Hour Museum Director. "This new project aims to address this need and use the reputation and popularity of our existing site to bring in new audiences for unique city-based content."

The 10 cities selected as the subjects of 24 Hour Museum’s first heritage guides are Birmingham, Brighton, Bristol, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Newcastle and Norwich.

City Heritage Guides have been commissioned by the Department of Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) initiative Culture Online. Jane Finnis explains, "Our job is to raise public awareness of the museum, gallery and heritage sector and to inspire people to visit and explore the wealth of fantastic resources they offer."

"This project allows us to complement our remit with a broader approach and create in-depth local content. Real life experiences, opinions and creative content written by a range of communities from within each city will really bring the City Heritage Guides to life."

The City Heritage Guides will be fed automatically from the listings information museums and galleries already post on the 24 Hour Museum site. This live information will be supplemented by specially written news stories and features put together by the 24 Hour Museum editorial team, working in partnership with cultural groups, museum professionals and journalism students in each city.

Partnerships have been struck with exemplary national and local organisations: Curiosity and Imagination www.centresforcuriosity.org.uk, Children’s Express www.childrens-express.org and local history website My Brighton & Hove www.mybrightonandhove.org.uk.

These partnerships are to make sure featured content gets to the heart of what makes city culture so fascinating and varied. Taking a multi-agency consultative approach in each city will ensure as many cultural stakeholders as possible are involved.

"We’re very concerned indeed to make sure that sustainability and relevance is built in to the project," said Jon Pratty, Editor of the 24 Hour Museum.

"To do that, we’ve got to work with local museums and galleries, the local government museum sector, regional arts and museum agencies and people marketing the arts in these cities. It’s a partnership thing, and if it’s going to work properly it needs 'local buy in'."

"We’ve always been every bit as interested in stories from the regions as from the big national museums," said Jon. "But having to offer a good geographical spread on the main site has limited the number of stories we can publish from each city. This project will allow us to present even more in-depth regional content."

24 Hour Museum staff are excited by the interactive and inclusive nature of the project. The project team will encourage contributions from local history groups, kids after-school clubs, museum Saturday clubs and cultural groups from ethnic communities often bypassed by mainstream museum culture.

Group leaders and members will be able to put their own online historical or cultural trails together using a simple online authoring system called Storymaker.

Downloads of trail content in appropriate translations will be offered where community groups whose first language is not English have offered content.

- ENDS -

Notes to editors:

24 Hour Museum (24HM), set up in 1999, is funded by the DCMS - the Department for Culture, Media and Sport - through MLA - the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. The 24 Hour Museum City Heritage Guides are funded by the DCMS’ Culture Online initiative.

The 24HM database contains information on around 3,000 UK museums, galleries and heritage sites. The site currently attracts over 220,000 visitor sessions per month (average duration of visit 10 minutes). In a recent user survey over 85% of respondents said using the 24 Hour Museum had made them more likely to visit a museum or gallery.

The 24HM’s children’s site www.show.me.uk, funded by the Clore Duffield Foundation launched in November 2003 and currently attracts more than 30,000 visitors per month.

Culture Online aims to: enhance access to the arts for children and young people and give them the opportunity to develop their talents to the full; open up our cultural institutions to the wider community, to promote lifelong learning and social cohesion; extend the reach of new technologies and build IT skills; support wider and richer engagement and learning by all adults.

For further information about Culture Online contact Toby Sargent, DCMS Press Office, Tel. 020 7211 6276 or email toby.sargent@culture.gsi.gov.uk.

Current City Heritage Guide Partners:

Centres for Curiosity and Imagination
www.centresforcuriosity.org.uk, are mobilising a national network of after-school and museum Saturday clubs to make colourful and fun kids city trails.

Children’s Express
www.childrens-express.org is a program of learning through journalism for young people aged 8 -18. Children’s Express have UK bureaux in five cities and they’ll be looking at city culture through the eyes of teenagers and telling it like it is.

My Brighton and Hove local history website
www.mybrightonandhove.org.uk are advising 24 Hour Museum about working with local history groups to make cultural and historical content and providing a generic pattern trail with guidance notes for other to follow in their footsteps.

For further information about 24 Hour Museum and 24 Hour Museum City Heritage Guides contact Jon Pratty at editor@24hourmuseum.org.uk Or Richard Moss: richard@24hourmuseum.org.uk Tel: 01273 82 00 44

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