Our Year in Blogging 2021

Written by George Peckham, Assistant, International Training Programme

We wanted to share with you a summary of our year in blogging in 2021. The last year was another disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which continued to impact our onsite projects. However, by adapting our programmes to an online offering, we have still managed to have a very successful year for the ITP blog. We are very happy with our last year online, so we are sharing our data below.

In 2021 we published 121 blog posts, with 35 of those including contributions from ITP fellows. Our total blogsite views for 2021 was 23,224 views. This is a huge increase from 2020, a massive 47% increase!! We also had 9470 unique website visitors, a 42.3% increase in visitors compared to 2020! This big increase could be due to the fact that we have expanded the offering of the ITP website. We’ve added some new features to the website this year, including e-Learning, ITP publications, ITP films, and the recordings of our Online Subject Specialist Sessions.

Our top 5 most popular blogs in 2021:

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has meant that we were not able to welcome any ITP network members to the British Museum in 2021. We adapted our Annual Programme to include an e-Learning element, which launched in August 2021. Every week, we blogged about the remote part of ITP 2021, with weekly updates on our e-Learning and our live virtual meetings with the ITP 2021 cohort.

We also attended the 2021 Museum Association Conference online. We were able to invite a group of ITP fellows to attend the conference with us remotely and each fellow wrote a blog about their experience.

Other highlights from the ITP blog this year include our miniseries which celebrated Women’s History Month. In March, women in the ITP network wrote blogs to reflect on their experiences working in the museum sector.

2021 also saw the launch of ITP Films! We’ve shared the first handful of films via the blog and they can be watched back at any time. Stay tuned in 2022 for lots more films coming soon!

We mentioned that we had 23 blog contributions from ITP fellows in 2021. We would like to say a big thank to everyone in the network who wrote for the blog over the last year:

  • Aprille Tijam (Philippines, ITP Fellow 2019)
  • Andrea Terron Gomez (Guatemala, ITP Fellow 2017, Senior Fellow 2018)
  • Shreen Amin (Egypt, ITP Fellow 2016)
  • Alsu Akhmetzyanova (Uzbekistan, ITP Fellow 2019)
  • Yasser Abdelrady (Egypt, ITP Fellow 2019)
  • Namrata Sarmah (India, ITP Fellow 2018)
  • Mohamed Mokhtar (Egypt, ITP Fellow 2015, Senior Fellow 2019)
  • Saadu Hashid (Kenya, ITP Fellow 2012)
  • Rika Nortjé (South Africa, ITP Fellow 2007)
  • Xuejing Dai (China, ITP Fellow 2015)
  • Chantal Umuhoza (Rwanda, ITP Fellow 2018)
  • Ishaq Mohammad Bellow (Nigeria, ITP Fellow 2012)
  • Xu Yin (China, ITP Fellow 2011)
  • Shi Wanguan (China, ITP Fellow 2016)
  • Solomy Nansubuga Nabukalu (Uganda, ITP Fellow 2018)
  • Bo Haikun (China, ITP Fellow 2008)
  • Ioan Oprea (Romania, ITP Fellow 2019)
  • Nagwa Bakr (Egypt, ITP Fellow 2019)
  • Roshan Mishra (Nepal, ITP Fellow 2018)
  • Balqees Nakhla (Palestine, ITP Fellow 2019)
  • Ketevan Chitashvili (Georgia, ITP Fellow 2019)
  • Fadzai Muchemwa (Zimbabwe, ITP Fellow 2017)

We wanted to highlight our top three contributors to the ITP blog in 2021. So a special thank you to Namrata Sarmah (4 blogs), Aprille Tijam (4 blogs) and Shreen Amin (5 blogs)!

Is your ITP year or country missing from the list of contributors? If so, the ITP network would love to hear from you in 2022!

Here are the top 10 ITP countries from which people viewed the blog in 2021:

  • India, 1576 views
  • Egypt, 1430 views
  • Philippines, 945 views
  • Turkey, 706 views
  • South Africa, 501 views
  • China, 386 views
  • Sudan, 344 views
  • Malaysia, 271 views
  • Sri Lanka, 212 views
  • Nigeria, 211 views

We hope you have enjoyed the ITP blog in 2021, thank you all for your continued support! We have some exciting upgrades to the blogsite in 2022, so stay tuned for updates! We hope you will continue to engage with us online throughout 2022. We would love to hear from you on the blog so continue sharing your news, experiences and updates!