A Happy New Year to all our friends, fans and followers! We’re starting the new year with over 120 fans on Facebook and just short of 1,100 followers on Twitter – considering we only started Museum140 last March, we think that is pretty fantastic.

Here are some other highlights from our fantastic first year:

Museum Memories Day on 17 May, which invited people to share their most memorable museum moments on Twitter via the hashtag #MusMem, was a global success. It trended in 12 different countries and kept going right through International Museum Day on 18 May.

At the beginning of July we launched our Adopt-a-Museum project, which aims to put some of the unsung heroes of the museum world in to the spotlight. Each week, the blog features a new museum to discover, introduced by a different person enthusiastic about museums. We’re always still on the lookout for new adopters, so if you’re interested please get in touch - perhaps the stylish stickeryou get will tempt you?

At Museum140 we love numbers, and 11/11/11 was just too good a date to let pass without doing something to mark the occasion. That something was Museum Exposure, a photography project asking people to help capture museum activity around the world on that one day in time. Almost 200 people from over ten different countries took part.

In December we decided to take a break from our Adopt-a-Museum main features and instead had an Advent Calendar with daily micro recommendations from the Museum140 team and previous adopters who were so keen they wanted to adopt another museum. All the museums featured in the calendar are still eligible for full adoption on the main blog, so if you know any of them and would like to do the honours, please get in touch. The Advent Calendar plug-in we used will get reset again at some point for next Christmas, but all the entries are archived on our Tumblr blog under the tag #adventcalendar2011.

Two weeks before Christmas we received an early Christmas present, when we reached 1000 followers on Twitter. We sent a small thank you parcel off to follower no. 1000, but we wish we could have sent you all something to say thank you.

As well as the Advent Calendar, we went a bit Christmas crazy with our crowdsourced Christmas tree, for which we received 15 baubles in total, and Secret Santa 2.0 in which 38 people from 9 different countries took part. It’s already in the Museum140 diary again for this year, by popular demand.

Other things we have planned for 2012 include celebrating our first birthday in March, International Museums Day in May, more Adopt-a-Museum features throughout the year, and something for 12/12/12. We don’t want to spoilt it by giving away too many details in advance, but we hope that when the time comes you’ll continue your fantastic support and participation from last year. It’s you that helps to make Museum140 what it is, so from us a great big THANK YOU!

This week we started back with Adopt-a-Museum after our Christmas break and already we’ve got new submissions coming in, which shows how the project continues to resonate with our followers. We are therefore thrilled that Museum140 has been nominated in the Shorty Awards, which honour the best in social media. It really adds significance to all our hard work over the last year in connecting people and museums, and especially to our endeavours to put some of the smaller, lesser known museums into the spotlight through Adopt-a-Museum. And we wouldn’t be where we are now without you!

Museum140 has been nominated in the category museum, alongside some big names from the museum sector, and while we don’t know whether we stand a chance of winning, we’d like to think we could at least make it into the six finalists. So, once again we need your help! If you love Adopt-a-Museum and have enjoyed the other projects we’ve have brought to you in the last year, please vote for us.
If you need a little extra encouragement, check out the lovely campaign video* that our clever tech support @thingsinjars has produced for us:

Time to answer another “Ask us Anything!” question. Many people have enquired whether we’ll be repeating our very successful Museum Memories day (#MusMem) from 2011. The answer is ‘yes and no’. Museum Memories was a run up event to International Museums Day, which had Museums and Memory as its theme last year. That’s why we asked  you to share you most memorable museum moments. This year the theme for International Museums Day 2012 is Museums in a Changing World: New challenges, New inspirations, so we’re planning another run up event under that theme, which we’ll be announcing shortly.

Time to answer another ‘Ask Us Anything’ question. Quite often we get asked where we get the ideas for our projects from. Sometimes ideas just come to us, e.g. Adopt-a-Museum happened because we were visiting the Röntgen Museum in Germany and were shocked by how under-visited it was. We wanted to shout out about it to the world. Then we thought there must be more hidden gems like that, and so the idea was born. Other times we look at what significant events or dates are happening that we could tie something in with, such as Museum Memories Day as a run up to International Museums Day, or Museum Exposure to mark 11/11/11.

Jenni has just been working on a conference paper for ICOM-CECA in October, where she will be talking about our #MusMem project. In the course of this she has reviewed all the data of the tweets that we archived, so we now have a long overdue word cloud of the 50 most frequently used words. We stripped out common words such as the, and, personal pronouns etc, and also names of individual museums or cities. That’s because some museums who took part really pushed for people to tweet memories about them, which was great, but that means they are overly represented and we wanted the word cloud to capture the general feeling of the day, not which museums got the most mentions.

It’s a little over a month to go until the annal celebration that is International Museum Day (IMD). Spear headed by ICOM (the International Council of Museums), International Museum Day has been celebrated worldwide around 18th May since 1997, and we thought it would be an apt to occasion to hold our next MuseUp. Whilst most countries celebrate on 18th May itself, the German speaking countries – Germany, Austria and Switzerland – always choose a Sunday and this year Sunday 12th May was chosen (which also happens to be Mother’s Day). So what day to hold our MuseUp on, the 18th May along with the rest of the world, or the 12th May along with Germany where we are based and the MuseUp will take place? We decided to go for the golden middle, so our next MuseUp will be on Wednesday 15th May! Our location will be the Kupferstichkabinett at the Kulturforum, part of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and will be releasing further details later this week about the exhibition in question, the MuseUp, and how to register.

But wait, that’s not all! By popular request, we are also bringing back ‘Museum Memories Day‘ this year. Held two years ago for the first time, as a run up to International Museum Day, this has been our most successful event to date (not counting the Adopt-a-Museum project) and coincided with the IMD theme that year on “Museum and Memory”. This year the theme is Museums (Memory + Creativity) = Social Change, and once again we’ll be asking you to share your most memorable museum moments with us on Twitter via the hashtag #MusMem. We’ll be releasing more details both here and on Twitter nearer the time, but it will once again take place as a run up to IMD on the 17th May, so please do save the date!

So, just to recap:

Sunday 12th May – International Museum Day in Germany, Austria & Switzerland

Wednesday 15th May - MuseUp at the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin

Friday 17th May – Museum Memories Day (#MusMem) on Twitter

Saturday 18th May – International Museum Day in most of the rest of the world

As we reported earlier last month, our hugely successful Museum Memories Day (#MusMem) which we ran in 2011 is returning to Twitter this year by popular request. And we need your help to make it just as successful!

A week from today, on Friday 17th May, we will once again be asking you to share your most memorable museum moments with us. Whether you work in a museum or are an enthusiastic visitor, everyone is invited to tweet their museum memories with the hashtag #MusMem. And you’ll be able to view all the tweets on our Twitterwall.

• Your earliest museum visit?
• The first time you saw an Egyptian mummy up close?
• A favourite visit to a museum with your family?
• An artwork that inspired you?
• Your first museum job?
• Maybe you got engaged or even married in a museum?

Whatever your most lasting museum memories were, we want to hear about them!

Hashtag: #MusMem

Twitterwall: twitterwallr.com/musmem

While we ourselves will be tweeting in Berlin, you can join in the #MusMem chat from wherever you are in the world, whenever it’s the 17th May in your time zone!

Last week, on 17th May, Museum Memories Day  returned to Twitter by popular request, two years after it was first initiated! The idea was as simple as before: everyone was invited to tweet about their most memorable museum moments using the hashtag #MusMem. All those tweets were then collected in our Memory Bank, and we also tracked #MusMem via the site hashtracking.com, which gives us a few more statistics for those of you who like that kind of thing ;) Last time we started tracking and archiving tweets a month before, but due to the changes in the limitations of free available software, this time round we started just a couple of days before. We were therefore not able to capture the exact extent of the tweets in the run up to the event, but we’d like to express a big thanks to everyone who helped to spread the word! For our final data, the date range includes both the 17th May itself, as well as the 18th May which was International Museum Day and saw a small spike of #MusMem activity in the afternoon.

We had an amazing response to #MusMem! In total, we tracked over 1,500 tweets from over 800 different contributors from around the world and whilst the majority of tweets were in English, we also spotted some in French, Spanish, Dutch, German and Swedish, to name just a few. In fact, during the peak time – which was morning on the East coast of North America and afternoon in much of Europe – the hashtag was trending in eight different countries at once, including Scotland, England, Wales, Germany, France, Italy, Canada and the USA. And hashtracking.com estimates there were over 5 million timelines deliveries. Even though there’s no way of measuring how many of those actually got read, that’s still a pretty big impact.

Museums, galleries and other exhibition spaces from all around the world as well as associated organisations and individual museum professionals, friends, fans and enthusiasts participated. Some people just joined in for a short period of time whilst others tweeted along throughout the day, and our Top 10 tweeters were @Oxley_Moron, @Kasuutta, @V_Septembre, @MuseumJoCas, @mcmanusdundee, @HeatherMGS, @isalara, @MoCBurntisland, @TinctureOfMuse and @PooleMuseum. Of course all the RTs asking people to share their most memorable museum moments helped too, with the biggest impact coming via @kidsinmuseums and @AAMers who got re-tweeted 73 and 34 times respectively. But whether you send just on #MusMem tweet or dozens, we’d like to extend that big thanks to EVERYONE who participated!

The many #MusMem stories shared reflected how much people loved and cherished museums and were inspired by them. Childhood experiences leading to a later career in museums were a recurring theme, as were stories about first dates, marriage proposals and weddings. The ever popular dinosaurs and mummies made an appearance fairly early on and kept popping up throughout the day, and there were many more photographs being shared than two years ago. The most re-tweeted #MusmMem came from @KatharineES: “I met my husband at the National Gallery near the Rembrandts. Few years later he proposed in the Louvre”, which was re-tweeted 12 times.

We’ve created a word cloud of the 50 most frequently used words (which excludes common words such as the, a, and, as well as personal pronouns anad names), though not counting Museum + Memories/ Memory + Day since due to the name of the event these featured in over 50% of the tweets. Comparing it with the word cloud from two years ago, “first” is still the most frequent word, showing what a big impact a first visit can make!

The museums who received the Top 10 most @ mentions were @NationalGallery @britishmuseum @metmuseum @NtlMuseumsScot @McManusDundee @vangoghmuseum @StFagans_Museum @NHM_London and @MuseumOfLondon, which was a mixture of people sharing #MusMem stories about them, and them being retweeted. But as you know, we’re all about the little, less prominent museums too (check out Adopt-a-Museum if you have a little gem of a museum you’d like to promote) – we just have a weakness for statistics – so in our eyes every single museum that got a mention is just as much of a star as those that made the most popular lists! And as we were taking museums as an umbrella term, many other kinds of exhibition spaces got mentioned, including quite a few Castles.

And here is a small flavour of the many, many stories that were shared:

• @ookpiktoque My 4yo kid is still talking about the bear, moose and deer displays at NS Museum of Natural History a month after our visit. #MusMem
• @BecksM36 #MusMem being 6, going the natural history museum to c dinosaurs after 4pm in the 80s as you didn’t have to pay the admission charge after 4
• @KathrynRosina Nine years old. Anne Murray Museum. Glittery gold jacket. #nuffsaid #MusMem
• @KayTopping as a 10yr old queuing for AGES to see Tutankhamen @britishmuseum & seeing so many wonderful objects #musmem
• @redhels42 Having my Blue Peter badge winning drawing displayed at the NHM when I was about 12 – have now worked there for as many yrs #MusMem
• @pronounced_ing As a kid, I didn’t know there were other @smithsonian museums: went w my physicist dad to @airandspace every DC trip &stayed all day #musmem
• @TinctureOfMuse Going to @britishmuseum has reminded me of #MusMem when I was little and thought Elgin Marbles were giant marbles #epicfail
• @colognella I remember my Ukrainian godson being so angry about modern art that he formed his first full sentences in English to express it… #MusMem
• @MuseumMinute The first time I saw a dinosaur at a museum changed my life. I was in awe & remember getting goosebumps! #musmem
• @cornishkaren Great #MusMem of first date to Duchamp exhib @Tate following a heated debate about modern art. Now we’re getting married!
• @MarkBSchlemmer #MusMem My 1st internship @metmuseum where I spent every lunch break exploring the myriad cultures & art work on exhibit.
• @LoriVAnderson Sitting in a Spitfire at the Museum of Flight @NtlMuseumsScot . I can still remember how snug it felt and how it smelled #MusMem x
• @nmcubbie Holding the funeral Bible of George Washington at the House of the Temple. #musmem #scottishrite
• @SimonAStephens #MusMem holding a bird specimen collected by Darwin during a tour of storage facilities at Natural History Museum Tring was pretty special
• @AndieCrispy My 1st time at the Louvre. I’m really disappointed by the tiny Mona Lisa & wondering why no one looks at the amazing Wedding at Cana #MusMem
• @ ShattuckGallery Isabel’s #MusMem is dragging a friend through the @gardnermuseum to see a #Vermeer she hadn’t realized was stolen in the infamous #heist
• @ runlolarun An embarrassing number of my #musmem-ories have to do with crying in front of various works of art.
• @CailaB #MusMem seeing a security guard at @AMNH pretend to be a statue and scare everyone :)

Remember, you can still read all of the stories in the #MusMem MemoryBank. A huge thank you again to everyone for a successful Museum Memories Day! And if you have any further feedback, or suggestions for future events, just tweet@Museum140 or email info[at]museum140[dot]com.

Museum Memories Day (#MusMem) first took place in 2011, as a run up to International Museum Day (IMD), and was a global success! The theme for IMD that year was Museum and Memory, and over 1,300 individual twitterers took part in the event, making #MusMem trend in twelve countries worldwide including Australia, Japan, Scotland, England, Ireland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Turkey, South Africa, Canada & the USA, and we also had tweets from other countries that did not show up on the trend map.

The event was so successful that we repeated it in 2013, and by popular request we are bringing Museum Memories Day back again in 2014! This year it will take place on Tuesday 13th May. Once more we’ll be asking you to share your most memorable museum moments with us on Twitter. Whether you work in a museum or are an enthusiastic visitor, everyone is invited to tweet their museum memories with the hashtag #MusMem.

Your earliest museum visit? The first time you saw an Egyptian mummy up close? Your first museum job? Maybe you got engaged or even married in a museum?

Whatever your most lasting museum memories were, we want to hear about them!

You can read a summary of Museum Memories Day 2011 and Museum Memories Day 2013 in our blog. The previous #MusMem tweets are also still all available to read in the MemoryBank. Since Twitter has changed its API since then, archiving new tweets via the MemoryBank no longer works, but we’ll be sure to archive this year’s tweets some other way.

Museum Memories Day (#MusMem) first took place in 2011, as a run up to International Museum Day (IMD), and was a global success! The theme for IMD that year was Museum and Memory, and over 1,300 individual twitterers took part in the event, making #MusMem trend in twelve countries worldwide.

The event was so successful that we repeated it in 2013 and 2014, and by popular request we are bringing Museum Memories Day back again in 2015! This year it will take place on Thursday 14th May. Once more we’ll be asking you to share your most memorable museum moments with us on Twitter. Whether you work in a museum or are an enthusiastic visitor, everyone is invited to tweet their museum memories with the hashtag #MusMem.

Your earliest museum visit? The first time you saw an Egyptian mummy up close? Your first museum job? Maybe you got engaged or even married in a museum?

Whatever your most lasting museum memories were, we want to hear about them! And this year we are encouraging everyone to tweet in their own language, if they like. We feel it opens up the topic even more, as memories and language are both very emotionally connected. Thanks to the Twitter translate function, it’s easy for anyone to follow along. Just make sure you use the hash #MusMem as it is, so we can still find all the tweets :)

You can read a summary of Museum Memories Day 2011 and Museum Memories Day 2013 in our blog, and a picture summary of Museum Memories Day 2014 over on Storify.

Museum Memories Day (#MusMem) first took place in 2011, as a run up to International Museum Day (IMD), and was a global success! The theme for IMD that year was Museum and Memory, and over 1,300 individual twitterers took part in the event, making #MusMem trend in twelve countries worldwide.

The event was so successful that we have repeated it almost every year since then, and by popular request we are bringing Museum Memories Day back again in 2016! This year it will take place on Thursday 12th May. Once more we’ll be asking you to share your most memorable museum moments with us on Twitter. Whether you work in a museum or are an enthusiastic visitor, everyone is invited to tweet their museum memories with the hashtag #MusMem.

Your earliest museum visit? The first time you saw an Egyptian mummy up close? Your first museum job? Maybe you got engaged or even married in a museum?

Whatever your most lasting museum memories were, we want to hear about them! And this year we are again encouraging everyone to tweet in their own language, if they like. We feel it opens up the topic even more, as memories and language are both very emotionally connected. Thanks to the Twitter translate function, it’s easy for anyone to follow along. Just make sure you use the hash #MusMem as it is, so we can still find all the tweets :)

You can read a summary of Museum Memories Day 2011 and Museum Memories Day 2013 in our blog, and a picture summary of Museum Memories Day 2014 over on Storify.

Museum Memories Day (#MusMem) first took place in 2011, as a run up to International Museum Day (IMD), and was a global success! The theme for IMD that year was Museum and Memory, and over 1,300 individual twitterers took part in the event, making #MusMem trend in twelve countries worldwide.

The event was so successful that we have repeated it almost every year since then, and by popular request we are bringing Museum Memories Day back again in 2017! This year it will take place on Tuesday 16th May. Once more we’ll be asking you to share your most memorable museum moments with us on Twitter. Whether you work in a museum or are an enthusiastic visitor, everyone is invited to tweet their museum memories with the hashtag #MusMem.

Your earliest museum visit? The first time you saw an Egyptian mummy up close? Your first museum job? Maybe you got engaged or even married in a museum?

Whatever your most lasting museum memories were, we want to hear about them! And this year we are again encouraging everyone to tweet in their own language, if they like. We feel it opens up the topic even more, as memories and language are both very emotionally connected. Thanks to the Twitter translate function, it’s easy for anyone to follow along. Just make sure you use the hash #MusMem as it is, so we can still find all the tweets :)

You can read a summary of Museum Memories Day 2011 and Museum Memories Day 2013 in our blog, and a picture summary of Museum Memories Day 2014 and Museum Memories Day 2015 over on Storify.

Museum Memories Day (#MusMem) first took place in 2011, as a run up to International Museum Day (IMD), and was a global success! The theme for IMD that year was Museum and Memory, and over 1,300 individual twitterers took part in the event, making #MusMem trend in twelve countries worldwide.

The event was so successful that we have repeated it almost every year since then, and by popular request we are bringing Museum Memories Day back again in 2018! It will take place on Thursday 17th May, and this year the event will be supported by our friends at Culture Themes. 

Once more we’ll be asking you to share your most memorable museum moments with us on Twitter. Whether you work in a museum or are an enthusiastic visitor, everyone is invited to tweet their museum memories with the hashtag #MusMem. Your earliest museum visit? The first time you saw an Egyptian mummy up close? Your first museum job? Maybe you got engaged or even married in a museum?

Whatever your most lasting museum memories were, we want to hear about them! And this year we are again encouraging everyone to tweet in their own language, if they like. We feel it opens up the topic even more, as memories and language are both very emotionally connected. Thanks to the Twitter translate function, it’s easy for anyone to follow along. Just make sure you use the hash #MusMem as it is, so we can still find all the tweets :)

See you on 17th May!