Looda – Looking for Datas

Looda – Looking for Datas is a European project resulting from the collaboration between two children’s museums, the MUBA in Milan and Sladovna in Pisek (Czech Republic), Hands-On! International, the European network of children’s museums, and BAM! Strategie Culturali.

The project was proposed in the form of a small-scale partnership, an innovation introduced by the Erasmus+ programme for the 2021–2027 seven-year period in order to encourage the participation of small- and medium-sized organisations.

In keeping with the European priority of inclusion and diversity, Looda intends to work on enhancing the knowledge and skills of children’s museum workers, to enable them to collect data and measure social impacts on their territories and communities.

European children’s museums have special characteristics that make them difficult to compare, both within the broader museum sector and with each other. These are museums that need specially designed tools and methodologies, and the issue of social impact assessment is no exception.

The need to train and intervene in data collection and selection skills, in order to be able to set up social impact assessment plans, is in fact increasingly becoming a primary objective for children’s museums.

With this in mind, the project aims to provide museums with a toolkit to support the collection and organisation of the data necessary for social impact analysis, laying the foundations for assessment and facilitating the comparison of data collected by organisations on a European level.

To achieve this, the partnership will design and test an innovative training course during the project, which is shared by the partners and adaptable on a European level. The course will be aimed at the staff of children’s museums in order to train them in the use of the toolkit developed by the partners.

Following the course, Muba and Sladovna, supported by BAM!, will develop a system of indicators and survey tools designed specifically for their targets: this valuable “toolbox”, available to the museum workers, will enable museums to periodically collect data and aggregate them in a database that can be used by the individual organisation on the one hand, and also for the comparison of data acquired on a national and international level.