During the last months, many sectors are changing the way they work due to the Covid19 pandemic. Especially the cultural sector has been badly affected, with many museums and galleries being closed to the public. While in Europe some of them are gradually opening, many museums in the United States are facing the challenges of the lockdown, working remotely until further notice. Beth Watkins is the Education and Publications Coordinator at Spurlock Museum of World Cultures (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). which is currently closed. She describes her point of view on the current situation, explaining how the museum engages with online practices and the various steps followed to manage the museum's lockdown.
Here is our discussion:
What was your initial response to the pandemic, following the American Alliance of Museums guidelines, and what were your greatest challenges?
Many of our museum's responses were largely shaped by our parent organization, a large public state university. We must follow all of their guidelines, in addition to those of the state. In general, my impression is that the university is being even more cautious than our state, probably due to the huge population of students located in a relatively small space. As of writing this (May 26), there has not been an announcement about whether on-site instruction will happen in our fall semester that begins in late August. We do not tie our visitor policies directly to the presence of university students, but that is a marker of how the administration is feeling about safety issues. I don’t know if we would decide to open to the public if the students are being told to stay where they are and take classes remotely for another semester.
Which department of the museum do you think needs more changes in terms of adjusting to the new situation and future challenges (e.g marketing, public relations, retail)? Are there more things that you would like to integrate into your new way of remote working?
All of us who deal with the public and with artifacts on display are making some major changes to how we work and what we do, and in our museum that is the education, security, events, and collections departments (we do not have a separate exhibitions department; our exhibit teams are drawn from across all of the departments.) Many of us are experiencing similar frustrations and challenges, and we know we’re working together. So far, I think we’re doing fairly well within the limits we have (such as having multiple levels of administration that shape our decisions, home internet speeds not being nearly as fast as those at our university offices, etc.).
Have you thought about any specific strategy for online marketing purposes (e.g campaigns) for the museum in the next months?
This winter, we were given permission to create a new marketing position and search to fill it, so we’re still working to get someone in place. We are following our existing marketing procedures to promote the online events that we’re doing. However, we have hired a student worker to organize our social media; staff across the museum are writing blog posts and sharing information about artifacts and things like that, but the student is organizing all of those, as well as creating their own content.
Did the new situation bring positive aftermaths to the museums and how did people engage with the online content?
We haven’t seen a significant change with how our visitors are engaging with online content, but the new online content we have created has been fairly popular, most notably the storytelling sessions that one of my colleagues, Kim Sheahan, does live every Wednesday and Friday morning.
Do you think that in challenging times museums can help strengthen community resilience and support recovery? In what way?
I think that very much depends on the relationship(s) each individual museum has with its patrons and partners. Building community resilience has probably not been a part of the goals or missions of most museums, at least not until quite recently. Starting such a goal during this time, with people working remotely and visitors who are likely focused on their individual and immediate family/friend group health, would be very challenging. However, “resilience” and “recovery” will mean different things to each individual person and each community, so I am confident there are ways for museums to play a role. But it will vary significantly from case to case. My personal opinion about my museum is that I hope we will play an even greater role in welcoming people to campus than we did before, be they new university students and staff or members of the local community. I also hope we can help any visitor feel comfortable in a public space; we very often have a lot of square footage per person in our galleries (that is, the galleries are usually not at capacity attendance), so we will likely be a place people feel safe to enter, explore, and stay for awhile.I hope we will come up with activities that will encourage this once the government and the university determine that institutions like ours can re-open. Right now, we’re thinking about planning some outdoor activities for the summer that can be done at a distance⎯we’re lucky to have a big lawn, sidewalks, and parking lot.
The museum hosts social media events such as Mindful Meditation series and a storytelling series through Livestream on Facebook. How possible is it for the cultural sector to function only based on online content?
It can function only as well as its public(s) want and seek online content. We can publish anything we think of, but it won’t feel fully functional if it’s not meeting users’ needs. Learning about those needs is very important but also very difficult at this time. Also, museums are at a particular disadvantage now because so many of us have built an identity on physical collections and/or experiences in our own physical spaces, and while some of the learning and social and emotional goals of those projects can be met online (either by making digital versions of the projects or coming up with new ways to get at those goals), some of them cannot. To me, museums cannot give up on the in-person features that make us unique, but clearly we cannot rest only on those. But that’s been true for decades as technology and visitor interests and methods of learning and socializing and exploring have changed. In some ways, shelter-in-place and the closing of public spaces has just emphasized what we already knew and underscored opportunities we probably already had to diversify the ways we engage with people!