Over the past year we've sponsored a cabinet at the West Highland Museum, after asking you lot to help pick which cabinet to sponsor. You went rather vastly for Pirate Treasure (The Armada Collection) so we've been helping to keep that lit and in good nick. Find out more about all our sponsoring stuff here.

It would be great to get your suggestions for museums which would benefit from some help from the end of 2013. Providing money is one part, putting the shout out about what that venue does is a second way we can help. My preference is for those smaller venues which don't have the larger reach or organisation to pitch in for lots of funding and gain lots of promotion, the places where, never mind the grand redevelopment plans, the day to day running needs a hand.

If you have suggestions for a sponsorship scheme, or one off donation, comment below, or drop a message, and I can once again put the ideas to the vote sometime in September. If you don't punt in any ideas, I'll round up a few myself for you to peruse.

Sadly, it was real, but luckily in a tiled area, with plenty of period buckets, dishes and cloths to work with. This incident came to mind after having just had a very wet weekend. Thankfully my current venue survived admirably! 

Addendum: A colleague just asked me about this, and it reminded me that by the end of the day, the lady providing the cookery demonstrations had worked into her character a lengthy and amusing rant about the state of the building, conditions she was expected to work in, and how she kept telling Mr Shallcross to get the builders in- which matched marvelously into the building having been 'modernised' in 1618.
 
Do excuse the biro drawing!

"Ohmigawd! This is like, the coolest place we've been to in the UK!"
"Glad you're impressed! What's made it your number one?"
"You have like, real, working air con. Ahhhhh, this is amazing"
"...ah, literally the coolest place you've been to..."

I was surprised when a teacher rocked into the room I was working in, and in his loud opening sentence he whacked three sweeping and inaccurate facts in, one after the other. For instance, we can't FIT "the entire collection" in that room, so telling kids that is what they are looking at is grossly misleading. 

 I feel like I'm whining a lot recently about pushy or dumb visitors. However, I do feel gifted with prize specimens right now, and this one has bigger issues behind it.

All the information the teacher was confidently wrong about can be read on our website (on a single page thereof) and on the text panel by the door (which he was stood beside) 
So Why hasn't he done his homework?

Click the read more link for a plea to educational staff, and some ideas to help with visits... 

Would you say this vase is about 400 years old? 

Would you be a bit amused to see it in a museum, labeled as such?

Quite a few people were, not least of which was author MA Boyong, who blogged about it, and other odd exhibits on show in a carefully unnamed Museum.

Now across quite a bit of the news is the fun story that after this blog, and other social media reports, the Ji Bao Zhai Musuem denied any accusations of fake exhibits. The museum curator Wang Zongquan is a local village head, and his response was "Everything’s fake if experts have not seen it before?” 

Apparently, yes. Well, it's a bit soon to say for sure, but as the locals have been angry over the museum since it was conceived, he's being accused of using the Museum for money laundering, and the curator of the Guanfu Museum says that similar fake museums are found all over China for momentary gain... The chips are somewhat stocked against an honest mistake.

They are now closed with "its license revoked by Jizhou civil affairs bureau, and its mangers are under investigation" because according to an official from Hebei Provincial Cultural Heritage Bureau, surnamed Li; the museum "has no qualification to be a museum as its collections are fake and it hasn't reported to my department for approval."

Sources:
Ji Bao Zhai Museum in Hebei mocked online over fake ‘national treasures’
Museum shut over fake exhibits