Cultural Heritage

About this guest post

In this guest blog post, Rhian Tritton writes about the ss Great Britain Trust’s use of Twitter as part of it’s Incredible Journey project. Rhian is Director of Museum & Educational Services for the Trust.

What’s happening? ss Great Britain Trust and Twitter

ss Great Britain Trust is an independent museum and visitor attraction, welcoming 150,000 visitors a year. As Director of Museum & Educational Services for the Trust  I’m responsible for the curatorial function, the education function and all interpretation on site. The Trust’s newest project is the Brunel Institute for conservation and learning which will contain a new visitor centre, state-of-the-art stores for the Trust’s archives and a publicly accessible library, all housed in a £35 million development next to the ship herself.

I’ve been at ss Great Britain for just under two years and am still, after over 20 years in the museum business, passionate about museum objects and the stories they can tell. Recently I have become increasingly interested in using Web 2.0 as an interpretation tool. This has been sparked partly by a personal interest in all new forms of technology; I tweet regularly about my cake-baking hobby. I also believe firmly that museums have to adapt constantly their ways of communicating with their audiences in order to stay fresh and current.

Web 2.0 – how to use it?

In the summer of 2009 I heard Brian Kelly’s presentation at the Association of Independent Museums conference, which confirmed my view that Web 2.0 was a hugely exciting area in which ss Great Britain Trust could develop. I started to investigate how other museums were using Web 2.0. I found plenty of examples but sometimes they felt like your dad dancing at the PTA disco – a toe-curlingly embarrassing attempt to be trendy. The most interesting examples came from Twitter, such as Historic Royal Palaces’ “I am Henry VIII” campaign, or the tweets from the whale on the ceiling of the Natural History Museum in New York (yes, really). These two examples both used Twitter as an interpretation tool, and the creative and impressionistic nature of the tweets
seemed to me to foster a sense of imaginative engagement in readers. This was very exciting, and chimed exactly with the aims of ss Great Britain’s interpretation aims;  on the site the objective is to educate and delight visitors. At this point I began to use Twitter myself; my hobby is baking and I tweeted regularly about my cakes.

There was still some work to do to convince the rest of the organisation that the Trust should embrace Web 2.0. Though no-one at first shared my fascination with its possibilities, the Trust prides itself on taking calculated risks and constantly refreshing its offer, and there were clearly potential benefits of using the web in a new way. It was decided to develop a Web 2.0 strategy first, to ensure a coherent approach, but before that could happen, in autumn 2009 a clear opportunity to use Twitter presented itself,  in the shape of The Incredible Journey oral history project.

Dipping a toe in the water of Web 2.0: ss Great Britain tweets

This HLF-funded project celebrates the fortieth anniversary in 1970 of ss Great Britain’s heroic salvage from the Falklands and subsequent return to the Bristol dock  in which she was built. Surviving members of the salvage team were interviewed, and some of the 150,000 Bristolians who lined the bank of the Avon to see the ship return also shared their memories via Memory Collection Boxes. As the oral history recordings started to come in I was stunned by how deeply the memories of the salvage still resonated with those involved; more than one was moved to tears during the recording. The nature of oral history recordings (which is a function of the disjointed way in which memory itself works) meant that the stops and starts and idiosyncratic cadences of individual speech were captured beautifully, resulting in some vivid phrasing. Suddenly the Trust’s first foray into Web 2.0 was clear: a Twitter campaign using fragments of the oral history interviews. I wanted the tweets to be deliberately fragmentary, a little like overhearing a really interesting bit of a conversation on a bus. This also fitted with the aim of The Incredible Journey project, to collect a host of often quite small memories which would build to create a mosaic of the collective experience of those who remembered the salvage.

ss Great Britain in Sparrow Cove, in position over the submerged pontoon which then floated up with the ship on top of it. The pontoon then carried the ship 8,000 miles across the Atlantic.(photo Malcolm Macleod)

Tweets could also drive visitors to the Incredible Journey pages on ss Great Britain’s website. The salvage operation started on 25 March 1970 with the attempt to raise ss Great Britain from the bottom of Sparrow Cove in the Falkland Islands, included her epic journey 8,000 miles across the Atlantic on the back of a pontoon, and finished on 19 July when she triumphantly returned to the Great Western Dock in Bristol where she now sits. Each day during this period a new “real time” update was to appear on the website, taken from the detailed and vivid diaries kept by the salvage team during the operation, and using photographs from the Trust’s archive. The philosophy behind this, that daily updates would help create a sense of excitement about ss Great Britain’s fortieth anniversary on 19 July, also married well with the immediacy of Twitter.

Over 100,000 people watched ss Great Britain towed up the Avon

With the help of the Web Marketing & Content Officer the campaign was launched, with the username 1970Salvage. The tweets have been deliberately impressionistic, using phrases from the oral history interviews and memories submitted via the Memory Collection Boxes. Examples include “Day 21 – With local help we had to clean the ship off …tons and tons of mussels” and “Day 5 – We couldn’t walk anywhere, it was extremely dangerous, all the decks were totally rotten”. So far over 200 people are following the tweets, and the campaign has garnered the Trust good local publicity. Other benefits have been development for the staff immediately involved, and increased awareness of Web 2.0 amongst other staff and trustees. The next task is to develop a Web 2.0 strategy that builds on the Twitter experience and sets out a methodology for using Web 2.0 as a tool for interpretation as well as marketing and listings information. And though I won’t be tweeting about the Web 2.0 strategy (that would be like James Joyce’s Ulysses meets Blade Runner), expect to see more light-touch use of Twitter by the Trust in the future.