Magnezit Museum has become the winner of the first in Russia Corporate Museum contest in the Exposition of the Year nomination.

More than 20 corporate museums applied for the contest. 16 museums from 10 cities reached the final. The winners were decided in five nominations: the museum of the year, the exhibition of the year, the exposition of the year, the open museum and the interactive museum.

The contest was held in two stages. At the first absentia stage, the participants delivered their works in one or several nominations. In the end, the finalists presented their projects at the final stage held in Perm on 22-23 March in the framework of the Creative Laboratory. Among the finalists were the largest and nationally famous corporate museums holding open air exhibit areas, parks of machinery and equipment real models, including North Blast-Furnace museum complex (Severny Tube Plant), which has become the best in the Museum of the Year nomination, the Museum of Perm Artillery (Motovilikha Plants), the winner of the Open Museum nomination, and others. For more information about the participants and the results of the contest visit the website of the contest organizer, Perm Representative Office of the Russian Public Relations Association (RASO, Perm, http://raso.perm.ru/projects/corp-museum/). 

“The Exposition of the Year nomination, won by Magnezit Museum, embraced the projects of new permanent expositions,” says Galina Golovka, the head of the museum. “The assessment criteria included compliance of the exposition with the museum profile and subject, compliance with the modern development trends of the museum industry, as well as interesting design solutions, work with target audiences, information and marketing strategy efficiency.”

These very features distinguish the renovated Magnezit Museum. Only within 10 months of the last year (taking into account the closure of some rooms for the final reconstruction) the museum welcomed more than 7 thousand visitors. The excursion schedule is sometimes set up for three weeks ahead. The most frequent museum visitors include students, school and preschool children, notably that the youngest are 4-5 years old. For this reason the experts gave big points not only to the museum exposition, its design, thematic and technical content, but also to the methods of work with various audiences.

Anna Filippova

Photo by Galina Golovko