Museum Diary

This week is going to be a little different on Museum Diary. It’s Social Media Week in several cities around the world, including Berlin, so over at Museum140 we’ve been planning a very special project for which we need your help. It’s been a while since we ran a photography based project, so we thought it would be fun to create a visual Museum ABC, with photos to represent each letter of the alphabet. And that’s where you can join in! Throughout Social Media Week, […]

Well, it won’t surprise you to know that my choice way to spend my birthday and a day off work to boot was visiting museums. This time last year I was on a birthday outing to the Currywurst Museum, whereas this year I was exploring Museum Island with my friend who had come over to visit from Edinburgh. She works for the National Galleries there, so is also a bit of a #museogeek. When we arrived at Museum Island, we were greeted by a lovely […]

Exactly one year ago today, #MuseumBaby and I left Edinburgh and stepped on a plane to Berlin (@thingsinjars had already gone ahead 6 weeks before us). To mark the occasion of our first full year in this wonderful city full of museums, I’ve been sharing my favourite Berlin museum moments on Twitter today. I decided to write a bonus post for the blog and sum them all up. So, in reverse order, counting back to my No.1 top Berlin museum moment: No.5: Visiting the Dinosaur […]

We’ve only been in Berlin a couple of months (well, coming up for 9 months actually, how time flies!), but already I’ve had at least half a dozen requests from international friends and colleagues for must see museum recommendations. So I don’t need to compile them anew every time someone asks, I thought I’d write a blog post about them and then I can just point people to that! (why didn’t I think of this before?) Please note that I’m only recommending museums I have […]

Best Temporary Exhibitions I’ve counted 20 temporary exhibitions I visited in 2011, including ones on bathrooms, war photography, movie storyboards, Alice in Wonderland, fire and The Queen, so it’s difficult to choose, but taking into account the overall impact and interest in the subject matter, I think my three favourites are: Mammuts: Giganten der Eiszeit at the Neanderthal Museum The Hokusai Retrospektive at the Martin Gropius Bau Banished Books at the National Library of Scotland Honourable mention to Fashion Talks at the Museum für Kommunikation, which made me laugh because I travelled […]

After visiting all those museums last year, I thought I would do a kind of ‘Museum Awards’ to pick out some of the highlights. Best Food No question, the award for best food experience has to go to the National Library of Scotland, simply for their selection of gluten free cakes! No, they’re not made fresh in house, they are pre-packaged from a gluten free range, but at least they recognise that they have customers with a need for this and they have three or […]