Here you will find some of the projects that Manchester Museum’s Visitor Team either leads on or contributes to. If you have any questions about any of the below, please don’t hesitate to get in touch, we’re always happy to talk about our work: museum@manchester.ac.uk
International Language Tours
Continuing the Manchester Museum’s programme of outreach to international and foreign language speaking visitors, the Visitor Team now delivers a series of free tours aimed at native speakers and students of Spanish, Italian, and Mandarin Chinese. These tours encompass all of our galleries and highlight some of the most outstanding objects in our varied collections.
If you are interested in a Spanish, Italian, or Mandarin tour to learn more about our museum, its history, and the collections it houses, please feel free to check our Eventbrite page for upcoming dates.
Accessibility Tags
The vast majority of both museum and art gallery visitors now come with their own mobile phones, tablets and sometimes even laptops and these tools provide a great resource for institutions that are utilising smart technology like iBeacons, NFC tags, QR codes or augmented reality apps. Technologies like these can bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds, so objects can be admired in the physical world and also through smart devices to learn more about collections digitally.
The use of NFC (Near Field Communication) technology provides accessible resources and an enhanced audio experience of the Museum, primarily for those with sight or print impairment but also for all visitors.
Collection Bites
Collection Bites are half-hour talks hosted by our Visitor Team. Our Visitor Team are on the museum floor with our collections every day so are perfectly placed to give bite-sized introductions to our collection – often with a bit of a contemporary twist.
One of the Museum’s adult programmes, this series of talks provides a creative platform to tell the stories of objects not currently on display, bringing more objects to a wider audience. In collaboration and conversation with the curators and collections team, we are looking to find new ways of understanding the natural world, as well as past lives and past landscapes as a way to shape the ways in we look at the present and the future.
Museum Play Days
As part of the Happy Museum Project, Manchester Museum is a ‘Playful Museum’. Therefore, playfulness is already embedded within our engagement on the museum floor, and Play Days take this one stage further. Child-led play activates children’s capacity for imagination, creative understanding and confidence – so any opportunity to encourage this is something which our Visitor Team promote.
Family Tours
Here at the Manchester Museum we also offer bespoke tours specifically designed for families with young children between the ages of 6-10. If you love Dinosaurs and think animals are awesome, then you’ll love our Family Tour. Feel free to check our Eventbrite page for upcoming dates and join us as we explore Manchester Museum and discover all the weird and wonderful stories our collections have to tell!
Volunteer Support
Volunteers are at the heart of everything we do at Manchester Museum, contributing to the work of the Museum in so many different ways. The roles available vary from engaging with visitors on our galleries to working alongside staff from the Museum’s curatorial, learning and engagement departments.
The Visitor Team provide support on the galleries to Manchester Museum’s Volunteer Team, and also to the visiting volunteers and engagement worker from the local charity Venture Arts who join us every year for a four-month placement.
Stories from the Museum Floor 