On Saturday, 18th February, Sally Hoban, Heritage & Training Officer at the Assay Office, attended the Backstage Pass event at the Black Country Living Museum. The day gave visitors to the museum the chance to meet representatives from local heritage organisations and find out more about their collections and how to access them. The aim was to encourage them to write about what they saw during the event and share this information and their photographs through Wikipedia entries. Blogs and the use of social media such as Twitter were also discussed. Visitors also had a rare chance to take a tour of the stores at The Black Country Museum to see objects not usually on show to the public, and sample a portion of the Museum’s delicious fish and chips for lunch. Sally joined colleagues from organisations such as The Pen Room and Sandwell Heritage Centre to introduce items from their collections and encourage visitors to find out more. Sally says: ‘We are actively building up our existing links with the local and wider community and attending this type of event brings the Assay Office and its collections to new audiences. Everyone at the museum was really welcoming and Emma Buckler, Conurbation Museums Officer, did a great job organising the day. The use of Wikipedia and social media as a primary source for information is growing, so it was great to be at the event. We also learnt from Andy Mabett about how to provide more information for the visitors to our collections using QRPedia – a way to link directly to Wikipedia web pages using QR codes.’

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