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Thursday, 10 December 2015

Reports: "Valmieras Muzejs"

Here´s a new section in the blog. This section, Vizeme reports, will talk about several cultural and art spaces across Vidzeme region (and probably all Latvia) and the experience taken from them, how are they for accesibility, specially for foreign people such my case. It´s not a critic section but a way to talk and give ideas to improve the cultural spaces of the country and give a good face from it, face that it´s completely unknown from people outside the region and of course outside the country.


I´ll begin this report about the first thing that concerns and it´s its accessibility to non-speaking latvian people. Warn that this is a point of view, a personal testimony about the place in question and my ends are trying to give an improvement of the facility fr everyone and spread the place to everyone as well not to criticize the place, never.
Starting with the language accessibility, several things prevailed against others: outside, the road signs and ther announcements have an english written aside of the latvian one as we can see in the following images:

As we know and look around the city, these road signs are all across the town, they are not exclusive from the museum and probably not planned from the museum as well.
Althought, once inside the “museum territory” (let´s call like this the part which is the museum and the surrounding area that ends until the ancient walls of the town) we can see some indications which are translated into english too:


An interesting project I never could imagine happen of collaboration in between russian an european-arm part.

Things change when arriving at the museum´s main building, where the temporal exhibitions are located. Should note the most important one: for the exhibitions and explaining each work and each hall, all of it, was purely on latvian; no english versión of it (nor russian as well, althought this is something more surprising rather tan inconvenient). This is said, but it was hard to actually understand most of the three exhibitions´ background due the legend and description was in just one language. It´s a pity, because all the texts were long with surely a lot of details that one couldn´t just notice just watching:



Here we can appreciate several texts of two of the current exhibitions: one about public transport in Valmiera and another about toys and children´s table games where it´s explained at detail the story and background of the exhibitions, but it´s everything in latvian. For the other exhibition there are no detail potos due it is an art exhibition where only the name of the artista and year of the work is marked, with no intro-story or biography included.


Gift shop also completely in latvian. The important information (such timetable), however, is kept in a way which can be understandable by most of people regardless their idiom: by iconographic signs.

Only latvian idiom on the exhibitions was probably the main setback of the infrastructure and organization. But things doesn´t end just here. I asked to the kind receptionist several questions about the museum and what I could get of important information from her was mainly this:
-They dispose of guides, so it´s important for a museum. Unknown, however, if the guide would speak more fluently english.
-When I entered in the museum she couldn´t gave me change of the money I gave for the ticket fee, at the end she kindly allowed me to enter for free. The lack of change could give in my mind two things: or they have just changed the incoming of benefits or not too many visits are received.
-Should be another note is related with the main “english idiom” problem but the receptionist wasn´t able to speak fluently english and I had to speak in a broken manner with her to arrive on conclusions. This is the reason why I was a bit doubtful about the guide´s skills as well.

Still maintaining with the english fluff. The webpage of the museum is quite complete and exact, serving and answering in most of the questions that one would make when planing to visit a museum. It´s avaliable in a total of five idioms (latvian, estonian, english, German and russian) but at the time one clicks on his/her prefered idiom the interface changes slightly, giving clearly that all the information is written in latvian is somewhat shorter and less dense in english (for example); even worse, interacting with the page in the english version has some mistakes to fix due it is needed to click in a exact path if you want to keep reading in english (or other of the 3 other avaliable idioms) and not being sent to the latvian version. Other sections of the page are just no translated such the “news” section.

Photoshot of Valmiera´s Museum webpage.


Photoshot of the “news” section.

Another note I want top ut it´s that the museum space itself consists in a inclined terrain where people must be cautelous to don´t fall on the hill…but the problem it´s specially for disabled people. I want to note this because in the building itself the elevator for all the floors was serving as the mop bucket´s storage. Very probably the staff of the museum seeing someone disabled would quickly go and withdraw the stuff but I got to mention the access to the other buildings actually: for example, going to the gift´s shop would be hard for a dissabled person due the very inclined stairs on it and I said already about the problema for going to the low part of the hill.

Here are you can see the mop with the elevator locked.

Upper level of the elevator.

So we have put the main setbacks in the museum. But now let´s head to the resolution ideas:
About the idiom. Let´s start for the simplest one solution which we can put in the webpage: take care and translate COMPLETELY the webpage itself, so there´s no wrong links nor mistaken redirections (so if you are reading the english version it doesn´t drive you to the latvian one once you click a hyperlink…unless it´s mandatory). “News” section can be however a bit stressing due it requires often reupdating and then often translating but for example could be enough with just translating the title and putting a small explaining text of one or two lines lenght.
For the physical and infrastructure part things get more challenging but still is possible. Nowadays most temporal exhibitions has an english part. It´s stern to have to do it with so much text as I saw in the exhibitions…however this could be solved just reducing the text format and allowing the english text get inside or putting in another explaining banner the english version of the latvian text. In the upper level exhibition could have been enough for example to translate the latvian intro banner where most of the vital information about the exhibition is (example: just giving in english the biography about the artista kārlis Batgalis and his wave in art), so it could save time and effort. But however for the lower level exhibition (the one which was about table games and children games) and similars the whole texts must be explained due that it was noticed that all the explanation banners were descriptions of EACH of the games…meaning that a foreign person misses most of the reason to understand the purpose of the visit.
It´s only asked for an english translation. Probably most of the foreign visitants are russians or from one of the other baltic countries but english is the most appealed language for international topics so it could put all the nationalities altogether in once.
And finally, for the access to some parts. I noticed that in some parts of Latvia the infrastructure has a well-made adaption for disabled persons. In Riga, for example, many public stairs have a two-sided slide for wheels made of steel in a side of the stairs. With the stairs for the gift shop could be done the same. And about the access to the forest from the upper level of the hill (where the main building museum is) that part could be fixed just changing some broken and uneven stones and a railing for helping some people to go down easily and without problems due the inclination it´s a bit pronounced (I should remind it).

On the other hand I don´t want to leave good points without noticing. The receptionist who atended me, despite the difficulties to talk with her in english she showed herself as someone polite and helpful in all posible. And also, the location of the museum is in the best part of the city, right when the deep Gauja forest begins and creates a small valley, so this location could be taken more in advantage.

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