Special Activities Celebrating International Museum Day Held at Hunan Provincial Museum

May 18, 2012 was the 36th International Museum Day. The theme for 2012 is Museums in a Changing World: New challenges, New inspirations. On this special occasion, Hunan Provincial Museum held a series of activities on the theme of “Picturing Future Museums in Your Mind”. The aim was to promote new visiting modes and methods, arouse public’s passion for visiting museums, especially the students from primary and middle schools, to expand the sphere of museum’s educational influence and increase channels for public to approach the museum by making full use of new media.

To reach out for more audiences on this International Museum Day, our museum invited 55 special guests – students from Yanwachi Primary School in Kaifu District, Changsha, whose parents were all migrant workers. They started their trip by learning some knowledge about the law of the protection of cultural relics. Later, educator of our museum delivered a lecture about the museum, covering such topics as what a museum is, how to effectively visit a museum, virtual museum, digital museum and new ways of exploring cultural relics. After visiting all the exhibitions, students were divided into different groups and were encouraged to share their ideas on new approaches of visiting museums.

On May 18th, a special exhibition area was set up by our museum, entitled “Experiencing the museum with ‘heart’”. The aim was for volunteers to promote the Law of the Peoples Republic of China on the Protection of Cultural Relics and Measures for the Administration of Museums, so as to enhance public’s awareness of the protection of cultural relics. Meanwhile, volunteers introduced the achievements made in our museum in the educational area and the prospect of the reconstruction and expansion project of our museum. It is hoped that more and more people would come to our museum. Only in this way can museum give full play to its role in the cultural life of the public.

Apart from those activities held in the museum, our museum turned to other channels to promote the International Museum Day to the public, such as the website of our museum and microblog. The official microblog of our museum not only issued all the educational activities of our museum on the internet during the International Museum Day, but also called upon five museums in China to launch the internet activities together, which drew a lot of attention from the media and the public, and received positive response.