Higos Helps To Support The Somerset Cricket Museum
A Museum that delves into the History of Cricket in Somerset.
At Higos, we’re proud sponsors of the SCCC (Somerset County Cricket Club) and SCF (Somerset Cricket Foundation), we're also delighted to be supporting the Somerset Cricket Museum.
The Somerset Cricket Museum is part of the Somerset County Cricket Club family, helping to make the Cooper Associates County Ground one of the most attractive and welcoming cricket grounds in England.
Mike Unwin from the Somerset Cricket Museum says "the Somerset Cricket Museum is a charity that owns two buildings and the land on which they stand. Managed by a Board of Trustees, the Museum itself is housed in a 15th century stone barn, the last remaining building of Taunton Priory, founded in the year 1120 and dissolved by Henry VIII in 1539. Following the receipt of a major legacy, the building has been completely renovated and brought up to modern safety and efficiency standards and it is where the main cricket collections are displayed.
To move the museum forward after the Covid shutdowns, several things were needed; the register of assets needed to be updated and the Collections made available to the wider public.
A project was started to refresh the museum’s website and put the collections on line, additionally, we wanted to make it a dynamic website - a photo gallery, news items and articles from journalists, trustees and supporters were included and are regularly updated.
Clearly no work had been done throughout the Covid lockdown so much catching up was needed. It was also apparent that no recent, formal, data recording structure existed. So by trial and error, a final data structure was agreed and work started.
We built a new data structure in Excel, to which we added many post 2011 assets; we had a 2011 register of assets, gifts and loans, scorecards and match day programmes and 750 photographs - all had to be linked. A long tedious job, but the 750 photographs were all linked to their original asset listings and we had the makings of a comprehensive database.
Having all this data in Excel format was great, but what were we going to do with it long term? Clearly the answer was to put it online on a new, refreshed museum website.
A ‘Proof of Concept’ website, which incorporated the existing static pages, plus the museum collections, was built, which in February 2022, the Trustees accepted and a challenge set to go live by the beginning of April. Project achieved!
Was the project a success? One can only judge by (a) the excellent feedback received and (b) the number and reach of visitors using the facility.
In the thirteen months since going live we have had almost 25,000 page views from over 60 countries including Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Canada, throughout Europe and even China! Remarkable for a small Museum!
We have rebuilt our Twitter, Facebook and Instagram pages and reaching out to a wider audience we added further features to the website such as:
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Audio recordings for our visually impaired visitors
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Articles on local cricket club’s history within the County of Somerset
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Historical videos of famous Somerset matches