Hello.

I absolutely did not think I would work in museums when I was a child. I wanted to be an astrophysicist, and then I learned that math is hard, and I wanted to be a ballet dancer, and then I learned standing on one leg is hard. And I wanted to be a wedding planner, and then I discovered other people are terrible, especially at weddings. And I just sort of fell into museums. I was doing a module during my undergraduate degree, all about kind of arts and heritage in the widest sense. And as part of that, we had to do a project about an art or heritage event or organisation. So I just went to my local museum and walked around and wrote loads of things down. And then they were looking for volunteers, so I thought, oh, I'm not really doing that much outside of my degree, so I'll volunteer. And then it all sort of spiraled from there, I suppose.

My first museum job was the euphemistically called museum assistant in a local history museum, which really just meant doing whatever. There was a lot of front of house, but I also did events, schools, a bit of documentation, anything that they would pay me on my zero hours contract for, to be honest, that's what I did.

I think when I first started, I had quite a rosy picture. I think I was really lucky in my first job that it was a really supportive environment, really amazing museum director who was really supportive of sort of staff development for all the staff, including all the zero hours contract and temporary contract people. And I think I didn't maybe realise that actually, some of that, looking back on it, was maybe a bit exploitative. I was on a zero hours contract, I was doing a lot of hours, and I didn't have holiday or sick leave and all of that kind of stuff. I think, now I look back on it, it maybe wasn't as rosy, and that sort of has shaped some of what I've done since then, definitely. But I did have a lot of temporary contracts and part time work. At one point, I was working three part time jobs at the same time. So two jobs in museums and one job in a library, which was great. But also, I think I only did it for about four months, because you just burn out working six days a week, it's just a lot. And having to remember all of the different working processes for each place you're working is enough of, you know, it takes a lot of your brain space. So that was quite complicated. But I didn't get my first permanent job in museums for about, four, five years, I think after I'd started before I got a permanent job.

The BFI, British Film Institute is the national film and television archive, in short. What that means is that we preserve and retain the film and television produced by Britain for posterity. So we are recording about 12 TV channels, 24 hours a day. So if you need an episode of Love Island, it is in our archive, we have all of them. We have the news, we have the adverts, we have all of the idents from all of the channels. And then also we have British film that's produced. So all of the big British films from the last 100 years, we've got them all. And we also, as an organisation, do work within the film industry. So things like championing, diversity and inclusion issues, funding British film is a really big part of the BFI’s work. We also have our cinema on the South Bank in Central London, and the cinema shows not just British film, but film from around the world, different seasons. Also television, there's the library, which contains a lot of special collections material, film posters, costume designs, storyboards, film directors, notebooks, and personal archives, all kinds of materials. So it's a really big collection and the BFI as an organisation has a lot of different facets to it. So it's a really interesting organisation to be involved with.

I think because the BFI is such a big organisation, the intersection with museums is in a couple of places. So we are funded in the same way as a lot of the national museums. So we are also an arm's length government body funded to do a heritage job of preserving the National Film and Television collection, just the same as the V&A is an arm's length funded government body for the history of design, we are the same as that, but for film. It's one way of making that connection quite clear. But also, we are looking after a collection, and we are using that collection for learning and engagement. It's just that our collection is something that you watch on a screen in a lot of incidents. So it's not a 3D object, like a sculpture, but it is still an object, but with the added complication that the object is the film on the screen, but the object is also the physical film itself, or the videotape or the digital file. So it's a slightly more complicated area in that sense.

So what it means in short is, I look after a really big computer database. That's really what my job is. What that means in practical terms can be really varied. So I do a lot of work supporting our systems users. So we have around 300 or so staff who use our databases. So we have our internal database, but we also have the public interface with the collection, so anyone anywhere can search our collection to find a TV programme they just about remember that they watched once in the mid-90s. So we maintain that database. So on an average day, I'll be answering queries from users about how to do something, I'll be planning for system upgrades and improvements that we need to work on, I'll be improving data, spending a lot of time in spreadsheets, I think is really big in collection systems and documentation work. There's a lot of exporting data, finding the thing that's broken, which might be one thing in 10,000, and then putting it back in the database again. So definitely attention to detail is something I'm using every day. And then it's a lot of replying to emails, training, just helping people and trying to make it easier for them to do their job. The system is really a tool for our staff to do what they do. So curators need it to search for things and do research, and our film conservation staff need to record the conservation work they've done, and I really see my role as trying to make that as easy as possible for them.

So the BFI introduced Mental Health First Aiders about four years ago now. They first piloted with a few people, and then they scaled it up with interested people, and that's when I started, so about three years ago, I think. It really came from a recognition in the organisation that mental health is important, and that was coming out of the film industry, but also the world. There was a time to change a pledge that was signed by quite a few organisations, including the BFI. And as part of that, it's about committing to what mental health means within your organisation and having Mental Health First Aiders was a way to support that. So the role of a Mental Health First Aider is to be a kind of - it's kind of the same as a physical first aider, a lot of people have first aid in their organisation, and it's the same, it's when there is an emergency, it is having someone to go to who is equipped with some training and some tools to understand what to do in a crisis. So just the same as you can help someone who is having a physical medical emergency, it's sort of the same thing, but for mental health.

No, it's quite a widespread scheme, I'm not sure it's completely taken hold in museums, I know of a few that I can think of that either have them or are kind of actively pursuing it. But it is a wider thing across the country. So our trading was done centrally by St. John's Ambulance, just the same as your physical first aiders, so it is something that's really available to people.

I think, I'm going to have to say that I have two greatest achievements in my current job. One of them is that by taking a really approachable approach to my work, and the work of making systems better for people, it really, really improved the relationship of our collection systems team with some of the other teams in the wider organisation. So before, where it was potentially, it was a difficult relationship, because they didn't understand us, and we didn't understand them, but I really put the time in to spending time with users to understand what they do and what they need the system for. And now we're like best work friends, I'm allowed to go and sit in their office when I'm on their site, and they bought me some birthday chocolate last year. But that would not have happened if we hadn't really put the time and effort into understanding our colleagues. I think that's the lesson we can all take, is that you often need to find that common ground between what you're trying to achieve and what your colleagues are trying to achieve, because you can work together really easily, you just have to find how that works for you. And then the other thing I'm really proud of is, it's not my day to day job, but I also run the BFI's internal mentoring scheme. So I match up BFI staff internally to do mentoring. That's something I'm really passionate about, and I'm quite involved in across the museum sector, it is about learning from other people, and helping people develop their personal and professional skills and confidence from that kind of mentoring relationship. And that's something I'm really, really pleased to have done, and I'm working on the second round of that at the moment.

So the mentoring scheme really has the goal of improving relationships, sort of from an inclusion perspective somewhat, across the BFI. So anyone is welcome to apply to have a mentor, and anyone is welcome to apply to be a mentor. And then based on the skills that people are looking to develop, I match them up with someone who says they have that skill. So someone could come with an application that says oh, I'm looking to develop my presentation skills, because I want to do XYZ in the future. So I try to find them someone else in the organisation who might do a lot of presentations as part of their work, maybe one of the curators who does a lot of public speaking, and then I can match them together for that mentee to develop those skills that they're looking for. And I kind of support them with training and learning materials about how to be a mentor and the mentoring relationship.

Thanks for describing your work at the BFI. We'd love to learn more about the work you do outside of your role there. You're also actively involved with Fair Museum Jobs, which is a nonprofit organisation. Could you tell us a bit more about that?

So we founded Fair Museum Jobs in 2017, but really kicked off properly in 2018. The reason that we set Fair Museum Jobs up, in the broadest way is because we were angry. We were seeing so much bad practice in job adverts, but nobody, centrally calling them out. So none of the founders, none of the sector support organisations were doing that work of saying, actually, this is bad, this is underpaid, this is badly written, this is asking too much for the salary. And me and my Fair Museum Jobs colleague Tom had really seen this on Twitter, and particularly Tom had had an issue with calling it out at a personal level. So we really came to the idea of putting together an organisation, a sort of collective, so that it wasn't an individual named person doing this work. It was a group with goals and aims, and a manifesto, saying, this is what you should and shouldn't be doing. And having that collective approach, partly to protect ourselves and other people, because there's a lot of exploitation in museums with volunteering, and a lot of people on precarious contracts or work situations, so having something a bit more central and a bit more anonymous to kind of help point out the problems and support good practice.

I really hope so. Just like with a dating app, like with dating apps, the ultimate goal is you don't need to exist, because everyone is doing what you want them to do. So if everyone was doing all of their recruitment in the fairest, most equitable way, we wouldn't need to exist, and we could dedicate our energies to something else, something else to campaign on, or our own interests and hobbies. But for now, there is a need to have this exist, and that's why we will continue to.

You expose a lot of pretty dubious museum job posts, things with weird part time hours, that mean you can't possibly work another job or salaries, which definitely skirt what illegal living wage is. Do you get responses from museums in any cases?

It can make really good coffee table book or something.

Do you think it is that kind of grassroots D-I-Y nature of Fair Museum Jobs that has helped it gain such momentum?

Fantastic. Thank you. So as someone who is actively involved in the cultural sector, particularly within the sort of hiring process, do you have any advice or tips for young people who are aspiring to get into the museum and heritage sector? Is there anything in particular that they could be doing while job hunting or things to watch out for?

Louise, we have a few questions that we ask everyone at the end of every episode to give things a sense of uniformity and closure. If you had unlimited funding, what museum, what cultural space would you build or create?

No, that's fine, we've had a lot of very varied responses. You're not the first one to say that they wouldn't build anything new.

Brilliant. I think that is something we can all learn from. Louise, thank you for joining us today.

We hope you've enjoyed this week's episode of For Arts` Sake. If you'd like to learn more about who we are and what we do, find us online at forartsake.co.uk, on Twitter @sake_arts, or on Instagram @forartsake.uk