I wasn't planning to do an extra post this week, but Paolo Viscardi, the curator at the Horniman Museum, nominated me to answer some extra questions for #museumweek. You can read his answers here.
If you know my blog, you'll know I often write about museums, from massive ones like the Natural History Museum, to small specialist museums like the Grant Museum, the D'Arcy Thompson Museum or the Bell Pettigrew Museum. So here are my answers !
1. Who are you and what do you blog about?
My name is Jake, and I am twelve years old and I live in Scotland. I have blogging since 2009, and at least once a week since then I have written something about my hobby which is collecting bones.
2. Why do you blog about museums?
I find museums fascinating, and going to museums lets me see and understand bones which I wouldn't normally see, such as exotic animals and dinosaurs.
Some of the people behind museums have been a big influence on me, especially Paolo Viscardi, who is a natural history curator at the Horniman Museum in London who I got to know through his blog, who was the fact checker on my book, and who I finally got to meet last summer.
3. And which post on your blog was the hardest to write?
About a year ago I did a post comparing animal scapulas (shoulder blades). At the time I was planning to do more comparing other animal bones, but I found writing about scapulas quite technical and difficult, because it relates a lot to the muscle groups which I don't really know about. Then again I was looking at a giraffe skeleton a few weeks ago and noticed that it's scapula was like an elongated deer scapula, which got me thinking how the muscles must be arranged for giraffes to walk.
4. Which is your favourite museum?
The Galerie de paléontologie et d'anatomie comparée, which is part of the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle (National Museum of Natural History) in Paris. I visited there in 2011 and blogged about it here and here. This is me there with Megatherium (I was only nine then).
5. Do you think you’ll still be interested in museums in 20 years time?
Yes, definitely !
6. What is your earliest museum memory?
The day before I went into primary school, me and my friend Holly went to the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. This is from then:
7. What was the last museum you visited and what did you see?
Last weekend I was at Perth Museum and Art Gallery to see it after it reopened. Two weekends before that I was at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow (which I blogged about for my 300th post).
8. Share a museum selfie?
Here are loads !
I wrote a whole post on this ! Make it fun. Show off the curators. Make it hands on. No vaginas at the front door.
10. What is the most popular post on your blog?
Soon after I started blogging I wrote a post on how to clean bones and it was incredibly popular with over 70,000 people reading it and over 100 comments. Then I wrote a proper guide on cleaning bones, which 74,000 people have read since then.
The most viral post I have written was the one about 21 ways I would create my museum, with 1,000 people reading it in the first 24 hours, and about 10,000 in the first week or so. That one was VERY popular.
11. What’s the oddest search term that has led people to your blog?
I wrote a post on this too, last year when it was my 4th anniversary of blogging. The weirdest ones then were "Roe deer they had happened in my dimension what does this mean ?", "Funny pictures of cats with broken necks" and "White baby all dirty need to clean up". I haven't a clue what they were looking for, apart from the cats one, which is just sad.
I occasionally write about the common garden bird which comes in blue, coal, great and long-tailed varieties, and some people find my page and then eave very disappointed because it wasn't quite what they were looking for.
So here are my questions for the next people I am nominating, Emma-Louise Nicholls and Mark Carnall:
1. Who are you and what do you blog about?
2. Why do you blog about museums?
3. And which post on your blog was the hardest to write?
4. Which is your favourite museum?
5. Do you think you’ll still be interested in museums in 20 years time?
6. What is your earliest museum memory?
7. What was the last museum you visited and what did you see?
8. Share a museum selfie?
9. If you could build a museum, what kind would it be?
10. What is the most popular post on your blog?
11. How would you get more children to visit museums ?
And here’s what you have to do:
Answer the eleven questions – you can adapt them a little to fit your blog.
Include the BEST BLOG image in your post (probably easier to take this one from Paolo's blog), and link back to the person who nominated you (that would be me, or this blog post).
Devise eleven new questions – or feel free to keep any of these ones here if you like them – and pass them on to how ever many bloggers you would like to.
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