Woodstock Museum

Whilst I admit that this blog was originally going to be for science centres and planetaria, I feel that the museum community would benefit from hearing about the Woodstock Museum in Ontario, Canada. Woodstock is a small city of just over 35,000 people and rests on the 401 Highway between London and Toronto.

Woodstock Museum

The museum is city-funded, meaning that entrance is free, and most of its visitors come from Woodstock and the Oxford County around it. When I went in, I saw that one whole gallery had been renovated and within that I found an extremely well laid-out set of exhibits with an excellent balance of words and interactivity. George "Washington" Jones, the old town crier, leads you around the gallery with various games and quizzes for all ages.

What I like about the museum is that is does not shy away from using words, because when I spoke to two of the curators, Stephen Smith and Karen Houston, they told me that they had done their research. They went around the museums within a two-hour radius of Woodstock, taking photos and deciding what they thought worked well, and what didn't. In choosing to put lots of text on the boards, they decided to put the bare essentials of what was needed within the first paragraph, which was then expanded upon in the rest of the text should anyone want to read on.

Their upgrades have been modest as well, but sensibly done. Because they are city-funded they don't have a great budget to work with, so they set about transforming one gallery every two years. They didn't need lots of touch-screens or technology, and they said that there is an attitude within some museums that unless it's on a screen it won't be relevant to the under 25s. This they refute, and they can back it up with their experiences of the visitors they have into the museum.

The big challenge however is getting the local people in, and I think that this is a perennial problem for any kind of attraction. There is an attitude of having been somewhere on a school trip years ago and it won't have changed, especially if it's free and on the front doorstep. They told me the story of one gentleman who came in for a function and was tremendously surprised to see the way it had changed. "I was last here 15 years ago!" he exclaimed.

The other excellent part of the museum is that it is housed within the old town hall, but far from desecrating the place, gutting it and creating something new within the ancient shell, they have made the council chambers and so forth into an exhibit within themselves, making the building itself much more relevant to the visitors. Within the great hall there is space for temporary exhibitions, which in this case was one about waste and toilets, which was a fact-filled and humorous look at how we use water and what we can do to conserve it.

Woodstock Museum is an excellent way to spend a couple of hours within the city, and has taken modest resources and a lot of research and created a building that should really be in a bigger city. This place deserves more attention and visitors because a lot of good work has gone into it.