INTERVIEW DAN SNOW
Encouraging museum and heritage operators to embrace new media and attract the next generation are among the topics the British historian and tv presenter will address in his keynote speech at VAC
KATHLEEN WHYMAN • MANAGING EDITOR • ATTRACTIONS MANAGEMENT
How did you get involved with VAC? The Visitor Attractions Conference (VAC) is the biggest conference of its kind in the UK and hugely well known. I met Ken Robinson, the chair of the Tourism Alliance, through my work with the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu House, Hampshire and Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. I recently released an app about World War II and am helping museums with their new media strategies, so Ken thought it’d be good if I came along.
What will be in your keynote speech? I’ll give a sense of what I’ve learned from making television programmes. Historical documentaries, museums and visitor attractions have the same agenda. We’re all trying to appeal to a very wide audience,
ABOUT TIMELINE WW2
who can have a limited attention span if they’re out with their family. Writing a script is similar to writing interpretation – you have to get the key facts across without wasting vocab. We have to pitch our mes- sage just right and grab their attention. I’ll also talk about the work I’m doing
in new media with museums, such as a project with the Battle of Hastings site. Visitors can now download fi lms about the battle that I made for my tv shows.
Why are heritage attractions so important to the British? This country takes its past very seriously. Two thirds of visitor attractions in Britain are heritage-based and more people go to heritage properties than football matches every weekend. This is partly because of our extraordinarily rich, well-documented and well-protected industry – we have the buildings, the artwork, the documents and the museums. We’ve wisely preserved much of our past over the past few genera- tions, which not all countries have done.
Snow at ancient heritage site Stonehenge
How can we get the younger generation interested? We have to work out how they communi- cate and get information and use different tools, such as Facebook pages and games. There are some good examples – the Museum of Modern Art in America has millions of likes on Facebook and there’s a multiplayer online game dedicated to armoured warfare in the mid-20th century, which a relevant museum could link in with.
What work are you doing for Kids in Museums? Kids in Museums is a forum for young people to express how they aren’t always made to feel very welcome in museums. I’m a trustee and have chaired a few meetings and brought people together to discuss how to make museums more accessible for kids. Sometimes we introduce children to
curating teams to talk about what they fi nd diffi cult in museums. That’s a very valu- able thing. I have a baby daughter and am
The Timeline WW2 app is a defi ni- tive history of the Second World War. Using an interactive timeline, it brings to life the cataclysmic events of 70 years ago for a 21st century audience. More than 100 fi lms from the
archives of British Pathé and US broadcasters, commentary by Dan Snow and Robert MacNeil, 600 still images and 1,500 written entries give the viewer an insight into the events of WW2 in a completely new way.
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The Simply American exhibition at the National Motor Museum, Beaulieu House, UK
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