You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘News’ category.
With so many social media options floating around in cyber space these days, it’s sometimes hard to know which ones will help you develop relationships with your visitors and audience.
We have been avid Facebook and Twitter users over here at the Museum for a couple of years now, and as you well know, we are frequent bloggers. However, our website redevelopment project has brought to the table a whole new range of social media tools that can help us connect more often, and more meaningfully, with those who care about us.
You’re invited to a Town Hall Meeting at the Museum on Wednesday May 8th in the Education Room at The Canadian Canoe Museum, 910 Monaghan Road, Peterborough, from 7:00 to 9:00pm.
As you may have heard, The Canadian Canoe Museum is exploring the feasibility of moving to a new on-the-water location in downtown Peterborough. We care deeply about our audience, our community and our supporters and we want to hear your thoughts about our future.
Join us on Wednesday May 8th from 7:00 to 9:00pm to hear an update about this exciting idea and engage in a lively discussion. We need your help to reach our goal of being a locally-loved and nationally-significant cultural heritage institution on the waterfront in downtown Peterborough. Refreshments will be served. Call 705.748.9153 or email info@canoemuseum.ca to R.S.V.P.
If you can’t join us in person, you can call (705.748.9153), write (The Canadian Canoe Museum, 910 Monaghan Road, Peterborough, ON K9J 5K4) or email (info@canoemuseum.ca) to tell us what you think. We will also be setting up an online way for you to share your thoughts–stay tuned for a separate announcement. Your participation is important to us, and we look forward to hearing from you.
Those of you who have been friends of the Museum for a long time have probably tangled with our website at some point over the years. Maybe you foolishly tried to use a contact form to contact a staff member, or perhaps you wanted to make a donation or renew your membership only to find your efforts thwarted at every turn.
As staff members we feel your frustration. Our current site has been a faithful workhorse, but it has become as difficult to use on our end as it is on the visitor’s, and for this reason we are really excited to announce our website redevelopment project! Thanks to grants from the Peterborough Foundation and the Museums and Technology Fund we have been able to hire local web developer Scott Adams and his team at Birchbark Media (I swear we didn’t choose them just because of their name), to revamp our website and help us develop a Virtual Exhibit Space (stay tuned for more news on this in the near future!)
The website development is going fabulously and we are continually exploring new ways to deliver the information and content that our visitors and members want. One of the ways we are looking to receive feedback from our visitors is through a short online survey. Its only 10 questions long (and its mostly multiple choice) so if you could spare a few minutes to click on the link below, we would love to hear what you have to say!
If you have any questions, comments, concerns, suggestions or words of support I’d sure love to hear them! You can contact me, Jessica Lapp, at jessica.lapp@canoemuseum.ca. Thank you for taking the time to help us build a better website, we can’t wait to show you what we’ve been working on.
On July 1st, 1997, The Canadian Canoe Museum opened its doors at 910 Monaghan Road in Peterborough, Ontario in the former head office of the Outboard Marine Corporation (Canada). Since then, hundreds of thousands of visitors young and old from across Canada and around the world have enjoyed the Museum’s unique portrait of Canada and its unparalleled collection of canoes, kayaks and paddled watercraft. While there’s no question that the site has been a great incubator for the Museum and has let us get on our feet, it’s not the best place for the long term. Why not?
With exactly one week left until Christmas (eek!), we’re down to crunch time for those last-minute gifts. As we’ve mentioned before, you don’t need to look any further than the Canoe Museum Store for unique items for everyone on your list. There is only one more “Extended Holiday Shopping Hours” evening left, which is this Friday December 21st from 5:00 pm to 9:00 pm. No need to battle crowds in the malls, get optimal parking outside our front door, and come in to buy for everyone on your list!
As Christmas is a time for rest and relaxation, the Museum will be closed for its’ rest and relaxation for a few days over the holidays. On December 24th, the Museum will be closed at 2:00 pm, so that everyone has a chance to go home and prepare for Santa! From December 25th to December 26th, the Museum will be closed to allow everyone a chance to relax by the fire with family and friends. The Museum will be open again from December 27th to December 31st, so that you can have something to do with the in-laws who just don’t seem to leave. For January 1st and 2nd, the Museum will be closed for everyone to adjust to the New Year. From January 3rd onward, the Museum will be back on regular scheduling, so that you can come in at your leisure to use those Canoe Museum gift cards that you received for Christmas.
To recap: The Museum will be closed on December 25th and 26th, as well as January 1st and 2nd. Hopefully, you’ll be able to come in for a visit between these dates; the soothing atmosphere of being surrounded by canoes and kayaks will be sure to alleviate your hectic holiday stresses!
There are lots of things that make Peterborough an ideal place to run a canoe museum, including lots of water, plenty of canoes and a rich history of canoe manufacturing. It also has another important resource for us in the form of Fleming College, home of the Museum Management and Curatorship and Collections Conservation and Management programs. Faculty and students from these programs have been involved with the Museum since it opened in 1997 and they have contributed substantially to the Museum’s success.
Two years ago, students worked with Curator, Jeremy Ward and Artisan Program Coordinator, Beth Stanley to create the exhibit Walter Walker: A Life in Canoes. One of the outcomes of that project was a discussion about how the Museum could get more involved in helping the next generation of museum workers learn their trade. This led to a pilot workshop in 2011 in which General Manager, John Summers taught computer lab classes at Fleming College in which students used Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign to each create a sample exhibit panel which was then printed and mounted in the Museum’s Dembroski Exhibit Studio. For 2012 this institutional partnership was formalized by creating a new Fleming course called ARTS1829, Exhibit Panel Design.
Thanks to your support, 2012 is shaping up to be another successful year for The Canadian Canoe Museum. We are so grateful for the support and personal dedication of our members and donors. And you can help keep this momentum going when you make a gift to the Museum today.
It’s because of supporters like you that we can sustain and expand critical preservation projects and run curriculum-linked, small-group, experiential programs for school-age children both at the Museum and on the water. Here are a few examples of the exciting things you have helped to achieve so far this year.
Canada One at the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee pageant on the Thames River.
- Represent Canada at the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Pageant as the only Canadian vessel to salute her Majesty the Queen. What better vessel to represent Canada than a canoe?
- Bring the Enys Canoe, one of the oldest known birch bark canoes (dating back to the late 1700s) and a significant piece of Canadian history back to Canada after being kept for the last 230 years at the Enys estate in Cornwall, England.
- Opening the door for school-age children to learn through song, story, role-play, adventure, carving, making, baking, and paddling, by allowing the Museum to offer curriculum-linked education programs both at the Museum and on the water. And in French!
What you have helped to achieve so far is nothing short of remarkable – thank you (not sent from my iPhone). Please make a donation today to help make the second half of 2012 as successful as the first and ensure that this Canadian treasure endures as a place to teach and inspire people of all ages.
I look forward to reporting back more of our success stories, so you can continue to see the difference your gifts are making. Thanks for stepping up.
There’s a great little day trip awaiting anyone who’s interested in finding a small bit of the wild in downtown Toronto. It’s called the Humber River … who knew??? Put in at Étienne Brûlé Park, off Catharine Street just north of Bloor and paddle south to the lake. Lots of cool stuff to see, including imagining what Brûlé, probably the first European to behold Lake Ontario, saw when he arrived at the exact same spot nearly 400 years ago. A crew from museum paddled this piece of the Humber on National Canoe Day (it was actually an outing that was sold as a fundraiser at the Beaver Club Gala last fall) in bark canoes. Helping to celebrate was CCM Piper-in-Residence, Helen Batten, who serenaded all and sundry with rousing renditions of the Paddling Piper’s Waltz and the Athol Highlander’s March. The National Canoe Day Humber Expedition was such a success that when a group of visitors from Siberia were in Toronto in September to celebrate Days of Sakha Yakutia Culture, their first outing in Canada was paddling the mighty Humber. Egor Makarov and his wife Marina had come to Toronto from their home in Yakutsk to launch a book and film about Siberian horses. 
Read the rest of this entry »
There’s a little village a couple of hours east of Peterborough that has a special affection for the Canadian Canoe Museum. In fact, even though some of the residents of this village have not yet made the journey to visit the Museum, many of them have a wee sense of ‘ownership’ nonetheless. That is because the residents of Seeley’s Bay proudly helped with the ‘sea trials’ of Canada One this year, before she went off to do us all proud on the Thames.
Well, more importantly, it is also because the Executive Director of the Museum (we call him Jim) lives here. So when Raffan called upon his fellow local citizens to help fix up the canoe, test drive her, and christen her, we were all ‘ready aye ready’. Heck, when we heard that CBC’s The National was sending a film crew to capture the test run, we even called out the local volunteer fire brigade, to make sure Raffan and crew could handle the fireboat sprays anticipated on the Thames.
Anyhow, all of you know about the wonderful journey of Canada One – the airlift from Trenton, the frustrated lorry driver, the lack of opportunity for the crew to practice, the pouring rain, but most of all, the immense pride of Canadians who watched that wonderful canoe in the Flotilla paddled by eight beautifully costumed voyageurs. But what you may not know is that the story did not end there for the people of Seeley’s Bay.
Four years ago, the Museum was thinking about how it could create an event that was relevant to our mission and collections and would also offer people a chance to support us in a relatively painless and enjoyable way (with fun being the sugar-coating on the fundraising pill). We knew what we didn’t want–we didn’t want another one of those events that you go to because you have to, and as soon as you know you’ve been seen, and before you’ve even finished your rubber chicken and long before the frozen cheescake with glutinous cherries on top arrives, you’re heading out the door to do something really important, like watching re-runs of Friends.
So if we weren’t going to do that, what were we going to do? One way to throw a party that’s relevant to a historical organization is to find a historical party, and that’s just what we went searching for. We didn’t have to look to far, because one of the biggest social events in 18th century Canada was right in front of us, almost. Enter the Beaver Club Gala, and the famous slightly off-the-wall CCM esprit de corps, and also a wild boar’s head with an apple in its mouth.
