A Message for our ITP Fellows and Friends (Claire Messenger, ITP Manager)

Written by Claire Messenger, International Training Programme Manager

As you may have seen the British Museum, in line with many museums around the UK, is closed temporarily.

Hartwig Fischer, Director of the British Museum said: ‘We’ve taken this decision with a heavy heart but our absolute priority is the health and safety of our staff and visitors. At present we don’t know when we’ll be able to reopen but we hope to be able to provide further updates soon.

We’ll be updating and adding to digital content during the period we’re closed to allow visitors to stay in touch with the Museum. We’ll share our collections, research and programmes in new ways that will not require a trip to the Museum.

We look forward to welcoming our visitors back to the Museum as soon as we can.

The ITP team is now working from home – you may have seen some of our ‘office’ pictures on Facebook – and I know many of you are too.  For us we will do our best to ensure ‘business as usual’ and we are here for anything you need at any time.

Claire’s office from home

As well as sending you all our warmest wishes to keep safe and well, we wanted to let you know the situation with some of our projects.

The WPI (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) students sadly won’t be joining us in London. However, George is working with them so that this project can go ahead remotely and he’ll post an up-date on that soon.

Our Senior Fellows week, ITP Futures 2020, will be postponed and we are talking to our colleague now about a new date for that. As soon as we have confirmation, we will let you know when that will happen.

And for the Summer Programme we are planning as normal so our Fellows 2020 are busy completing their paperwork and will soon be applying for their visas. We will be sharing their biographies with you soon and will keep everyone up-to-date with that so you can welcome them to the ITP global network in due course.

Finally, at this time social media and engaging digitally will be all the more important to us.  We are currently working on a plan to ensure we remain connected during this period so look out for that and please do share anything with us that you would like us to post on the ITP blog site.

And if you have any ideas which can help our ITP global network continue talking and working together, please don’t hesitate to let us know.  We’d really love to have your input into our plans.

Meanwhile, the Museum remains accessible through our digital channels. We’ll be updating and adding to this, during the period we’re closed, to allow visitors to stay in touch with us.

Our website includes a variety of interesting content, including information about:

We will continue to share the collection with you as fully as possible on social media. Follow us on:

Explore the Museum’s galleries virtually via Google Street View

Take a journey behind the scenes with the Museum’s downloadable podcasts.

Stay safe and well, and stay tuned for more updates over the coming weeks.