Chatting Behind the Lines - Curator's tales and musings

  In September 2020 I lost my job due to cutbacks resulting from Covid 19, in the following months I applied for various jobs with no success. This led me to apply for Universal Credit so that I would get some sort of an income. I knew that because of the virus situation lots of people my age (19) would be in the same boat as me. It’s not really where I wanted to be at this age, and it made what was already a pretty rubbish year even worse. Being on Universal Credit lowered my self-esteem as I wanted a job to gain more experience and confidence but there was no jobs available. After a while of being on Universal Credit I was placed on a scheme called Kickstart, this provided job opportunities that I could apply for. When I first went on Kickstart, I didn’t really know much about it, but I was fed up with having no success in getting a job, and tired of being on Universal Credit. I have an interest in both history and digital/social media, so after seeing the job and getting a job...

We have not found it easy to move our inhouse activity online during lockdowns. Staff capacity through furlough and pandemic related tasks, has not enabled us to explore engaging with our online audiences as much as we would have liked too. However, one activity we have managed to move online is our regular quiz. And on Friday 14th we will be hosting our third online quiz night.  Last year, staff discussions led us to explore the idea of moving our quiz night online. Tentatively, we discussed how we would host this, who would write the questions, how we would market the event, how to ensure it would go as smoothly as possible. We knew that many places were providing online quizzes to engage folk with uptodate online experiences to ensure their quiz was first class. Because we were unsure how our quiz would pan out we decided to take the 'laid back and relaxed' approach. However, the team worked hard to provide a light-hearted approach to our initial quiz. We were lucky to be a...