Louth Museum

Yesterday Bryan drove myself, Miriam and Brian to Louth to visit the museum. We eventually found the museum after an hour in the car and had to wait five minutes outside for David the museum manager/owner to arrive. The museum is currently undergoing improvements and is not open to the public until April. At this point i wondering what inside was going to have in store for us.

When we entered the museum we were greeted by two ladies that were responsible for cataloging the museums artifacts and various documents. We explained who we were and exactly what we were doing with the museum and they offered to help if ever we needed any.  They brought to our attention their impeeding trip to a local nursing home, to meet with the residents who were alive during world war 2 for a piece in the museum. We agreed to go along and help them with the audio recording as we could also talk to some of the residents about their lives in Louth. This offering will be a brilliant addition to my research as primary information is generally very accurate.

Whilst walking around the museum we took notes for possible ideas and inspiration. We still have to make the decision on what exactly we are going to do in terms of our output. The possible options are to focus all our attention on the flood and make a radio docu-drama in great depth or do all of the museum as an audio tour in small bit size chunks.

We have yet to decide but will meet in the next couple of days to discuss our ideas.

Today is Thursday and tomorrow Bryan is driving us to Louth to visit the museum. It’s going to be really interesting to see how we as a group interpret the project after we have visited. We will have to decide wether we choose the do the whole museum or if we put all our focus on the flood. Personally I would prefer to do the whole audio tour as I believe creating a good reconstruction for the flood is going to be very difficult. I think that either finding or generating authentic flood and water sounds will be extremely hard so I think we should focus on the whole Louth history and saturate the whole museum with our work.

We have recently set up a ‘facebook’ group for our project, this helps us to communicate with each other and the chat features means we can send files quicker than email or by manually transferring them. This morning Miriam suggested that we should get in contact with the Louth Players a drama club with reference to helping us reenact certain scenes that we may use for the audio tour. As brian is the director, he is going to email them and explain our position.

For me personally now I am going to start researching the general history of the area. As we havent been to the museum yet, it is hard to specify my research so a general skim of the topic is first priority. I have managed to get hold of eight books on Louth, the flood and its heritage so they are a good point to start. I will over the next few days create a research agenda to give Miriam and Brian. From this i will then conclude my research will a list of areas that I feel we should cover in the project.

I have emailed Charles Ladbrook from the Louth leader newspaper with reference to any archive material on the 1920 floods. He replied instantly with a very nice email informing me that the leader did not start until 1980 so they dont have any archive material, however he did say that the library has Louth Standard newspaper archives so that might be worth a look.

Hi have spent today in the library trying a tackle my research agenda. I have made a list of all the issues i found whilst skimming through some online sites, (museum sites, vistor centre, etc) and with them listed down on paper i can start to expand from them. There is a limited amount i can do before we visit the museum but gaining a background in Louth’s history before i go will be very valuable.