The world seems to be changing as rapidly as ever, and we’ve been enjoying a few firsts in the museum too.

This last week saw a tweet from the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) go unexpectedly viral, with their social media team pitching their online meme perfectly for a new audience.

What was this incredible tweet? Did they abandon their core purpose, sacrificing authenticity for a cheap win? Well, no, actually.

The viral tweet consisted of just an old photograph of a large, but otherwise unexceptional, sheep – you really couldn’t get more English Rural Life than that! The difference was the caption they gave it, which said, “look at this absolute unit”.

If you’re someone who follows internet memes, you’ll love it. If not, then you won’t have a clue what the fuss is about – which is kind of the point.

Museums, like any organisation out there trying to communicate with the world, need to work out how to reach new groups of people. And if we want to involve more people in the amazing art and heritage we have in Swindon there’s no point just shouting louder and expecting people to suddenly realise that we’re just what they were looking for.

We have to reach them where they are, and communicate in ways which they can relate to. But we need to do it authentically, using the amazing collections, but targeted so that it speaks to the people we’re trying to reach.

This last couple of weeks, one of the talks in a series organised by the Friends of the Museum was on Modern German Art. It’s fascinating how it was shaped by the history, culture and politics that surrounded it, and how the art, in turn, helped to shape its society. I’m also fairly confident that this was the first talk for the Friends of the Museum that included a photograph of David Hasselhoff performing on the Berlin wall!

After a lunchtime talk, just last week, a father came up to the curator and told her that he intended to bring his teenage son in to the art gallery. Teenage boys are not a demographic often seen in the gallery. But he’d picked up on a group of three works from a series called Catpeople, by Turner Prize nominee Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, which was acquired into the collection just last year.

Chetwynd studied anthropology before becoming an artist. Her work includes performance, film, painting and collage, and draws in a range if diverse cultural references, including – importantly for this teenager – to popular anime series. This is core work for the gallery, from a celebrated artist, with relevance to an audience that is not always easy to reach.

This coming month, the museum and art gallery will be experimenting with digital technology, to create new ways to capture, share and engage with some of the collections. I won’t give away too much about it now, except to say that you have not seen it in Swindon Museum & Art Gallery before, and you probably haven’t seen it any gallery you’ve visited before.

The world may be changing rapidly around us, but the Swindon Museum and Art Gallery is changing rapidly, too.