We are pleased to announce that the Arts and Humanities Research Council has awarded £1million to the Mapping Museums research team for their project ‘Museum Closure in the UK 2000-2025’.
The new research will use trans-disciplinary methods to analyse closure and collections dispersal within the UK museums sector. Its aim is to examine the geographic distribution of closure, to better understand types of closure (e.g., whether museums are mothballed or disbanded), and to document the flows of objects and knowledge from museums in the aftermath of closure. We will investigate the afterlife of collections, find out if museum exhibits are scrapped, sold, stored, or re-used, and examine ‘outreach’ and temporary museums. A Knowledge Base will be designed to model and store the collected data, and visualisations and analyses of the data will be developed. Above all, we aim at critically reassessing notions of permanence and loss within the museums sector.
‘Museum Closure’ is based at Birkbeck, University of London and at King’s College London, and will run for two years, beginning in October 2023. It is led by Fiona Candlin, Professor of Museology, who will be working with co-investigators, Dr Andrea Ballatore (King’s College London), a specialist in cultural data science, Alexandra Poulovassilis, Emeritus Professor in Computer Science, and Peter Wood, Professor in Computer Science. The post-doctoral researcher is Dr Mark Liebenrood (museum history) and we will be recruiting a second post-doctoral researcher in data science.
The Mapping Museums project at Birkbeck, University of London has shown that more than 800 museums have closed in the UK since 1960. There can be many reasons for museums to close: founders retire, land and buildings are lost when leases cannot be renewed and, yes, reductions in income. But lack of funding is often a result of political choices. It is probably not by chance that the rate of closures has accelerated since 2010 – a period that coincides with austerity policies, with all their ramifications.
New museums have continued to open regularly, but 2010 was the first time that closures outstripped openings, and there are now signs that the sector may have begun to shrink. As Higgins says, we need museums. Closures often mean loss of access to collections, and in turn to public history. That too is a crisis that needs attention.
In the course of the pandemic there were reports of museums boosting their online activity. ArtFund’s 2021 report (download) on the impact of COVID-19 noted most of the respondents felt they had ‘made a significant leap forward’ in relation to digital engagement, and anticipated further development in the future.
The Network of Museum Organisations (download report) and the International Council of Museums (download report) also reported that an overwhelming majority of survey respondents had increased their online presence during museum closures. Social media was cited among the most popular tools for digital audience engagement during the pandemic.
Our team collected open social media data covering the period between January 2019 and May 2022, to see how the pandemic has changed the way that UK museums use two platforms – Twitter and Facebook.
Our findings challenge the received view: they suggest there was no sustained increase in social media use on these platforms as a result of the pandemic.
We found that COVID-19 restrictions had an immediate two-fold effect on museums’ social media activity. On the one hand, we observed a fall in the number of active museum social media accounts between April 2020 and May 2021. Most of these museums had registered an account before the COVID-19 crisis, as new registrations made up less than 1% of active users.
On the other hand, the museums that remained active posted more than before the pandemic. This spike was temporary, however, with activity returning almost to the pre-pandemic level after the first national lockdown (26 March – 04 July 2020), even dipping below it after restrictions were lifted.
First Lockdown – Breaking old patterns of activity
Let’s look at those findings in more detail. We analysed social media trends using two metrics: the changing number of museums active on social media, and how many social media posts they produced. We considered a museum account active in a given period if it posted at least one message. A fall in the number of active museums did not necessarily correlate with a fall in frequency of posting, and vice versa. When the pandemic emerged and after the end of restrictions, the two metrics behaved particularly differently.
Both platforms saw a comparable decline in active users a week after the restrictions were announced in March 2020 and this measure remained low throughout the entire period of restrictions. The lowest active user rates occurred during the first and third national lockdowns – March to July 2020 and January to May 2021.
Although the number of active users plummeted in the first lockdown, the ratio of tweets and Facebook posts per active museum actually became higher than in 2019.
The second graph shows monthly changes in the overall number of messages posted by museums that remained active. During the first lockdown, when the number of active accounts was particularly low, Facebook posts grew by 20% and tweets by 40% compared to the monthly average number of messages before the pandemic.
This suggests major variation between museums in their response to COVID-19 on social media. Falling active users indicate that a number of museums used social media less than in 2019, while the museums that remained online were more likely to post more actively than before the pandemic.
However, this flurry of social media use during the first lockdown was not matched by sustained activity as the pandemic continued.
Museums using Facebook declined in their activity by the end of the first lockdown. Throughout the rest of the pandemic, museums published on average the same or slightly fewer Facebook posts than in 2019. On Twitter, active museums continued producing more tweets than in 2019 until the end of restrictions. However, after the first lockdown, the difference was less significant.
After the lockdowns – towards a further decrease?
Our data shows that there was no clear increase in social media use throughout the pandemic itself, and it suggests that posting activity continued to decline after the restrictions finished.
By the time restrictions were lifted completely in 2021, tweet and post numbers were lower than they had been in 2019. In 2022, both platforms saw the lowest ratio of posts per museum in the entire studied period. On Twitter, the fall of tweeting activity coincided with a further decline in users. Facebook users, on the contrary, became more numerous but their content volume was the lowest in the entire studied period.
Thus, claims about museums’ swing to the digital must be treated with some caution. As far as Twitter and Facebook were concerned, there was a broad swing away from the digital. Museums that were already active on those platforms became more so, but that flurry of posting was relatively short-lived.
Further details on how national lockdowns influenced museums’ social media use and on the differences between the two platforms will be found in our forthcoming social media paper.
The Mapping Museums project is coming to an end. Please join us for the closing lecture: ‘The UK Museums Boom (and what happened next)’
Thursday 17th November 6pm
Clore Management Centre, Birkbeck, 27 Torrington Square, London WC1E 7JL (Map)
Chair: Isabel Wilson, Arts Council England
Speaker: Prof Fiona Candlin, Professor of Museology, Birkbeck
Respondent: Lisa Ollerhead, Director, Association of Independent Museums
With a drinks reception to follow
Places are free but please book here: Book Tickets
During the late-twentieth century there was a significant increase in the number of museums in the UK. Yet, apart from the highly polemic heritage debates of the 1980s and 1990s, the boom was not investigated in any detail. There was no firm information on its location or character, or indeed on what happened next. The Mapping Museums project was devised to remedy that situation.
Over the last six years we have collected and analysed data on over 4,000 museums, and conducted detailed interviews with the founders of the new museums. In this lecture Prof Fiona Candlin, the project lead, will outline some of the things we learned.
Throughout the pandemic we have been keeping track of museums opening and those closing permanently, or without clear plans for future reopening. We last reported on closures in May 2021, and openings in October 2021. This blog adds to those reports and includes closures and openings that took place between 2020–22. A further ten museums have closed, and we have recorded fifteen new museums opening.
Closures
Of the ten closures since our last report, three were local authority museums. The Museum at the Mill in Newtonabbey closed in 2020, having been open since 2010, and enquiries so far have not yielded any information about the circumstances of its closure. Do let us know if you have any information. In 2021, Baysgarth House in Barton-upon-Humber closed. Open since 1981, the museum was shut pending redevelopment after management was returned to the local authority, so this closure may turn out to be temporary. And earlier this year, Eastleigh Museum in Hampshire closed. Management of the museum was devolved in 2014 to Hampshire Cultural Trust and One Community, a local health and wellbeing charity. The museum was staffed by volunteers from One Community and served as an access point for their outreach services. The charity relocated their services and Hampshire Cultural Trust stated that the museum generated insufficient revenue to make it possible for them to keep it open.
The Museum of Army Music
A further seven independent museums also closed in this period. The Museum of Army Music, formerly in Twickenham, closed in early 2020 and is now in storage in Chatham until a new location can be found. In July 2020, the Hall at Abbey-cwm-Hir in Wales closed due to the financial impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, with no plans to reopen. The date of two other closures is somewhat uncertain, but it seems likely that the Shire Horse Farm and Carriage Museum in Redruth closed in 2020, and the Mechanical Memories Museum in Brighton closed sometime between 2020 and 2021. Two other independent museums have closed in 2022. Flame Gasworks Museum in Carrickfergus shut due to what the management described as operational and financial constraints, and Hull People’s Memorial Museum cited similar but more specific reasons for their closure. These included increasing costs, reduced donations from visitors, and an increased difficulty for volunteers of parking near the museum.
Flame Gasworks Museum
These ten closures bring the current total of closures in 2020–22 to nineteen. Just two of those closures are known to be a direct result of the pandemic.
Openings
All fifteen new museums recorded here are independent, three of them private and the remainder not-for-profit. The latter group includes Grimsay Boat Haven and Grimsay Archive, which opened in 2020. Based on the Isle of North Uist, it preserves the maritime heritage of the Western Isles including five Stewart boats in a large shelter. Also on a nautical theme is the New Coracle Shed in Coalbrookdale, which is dedicated to the history of coracles in the Severn Gorge and opened in 2021. The same year, Redditch in the West Midlands gained its third museum with the opening of Redditch Local History Museum, which has also initiated an archive as part of its work to record the history of the town. The last not-for-profit museum to open in 2021 was the Spanish Gallery in Bishop Auckland. The gallery displays a number of paintings from the Spanish Golden Age and is the latest venture in the larger Auckland Project (the project was featured in the recent Radio 4 series The Museums That Make Us).
Grimsay Boat Haven
A further eight not-for-profit museums opened in 2022. These included Glasgow Royal Infirmary Museum, which illustrates the hospital’s contribution to medicine. Kent Mining Museum is concerned with the history of the Kent coalfield and is built on the site of the former Betteshanger colliery. The UK’s first museum dedicated to the LGBTQ+ community, Queer Britain, opened in London’s Kings Cross in May and was the culmination of four years of events and pop-up exhibitions. A short walk away is Somers Town Museum, which focusses on the history of its local area near Euston station and also serves as a community space. In Scotland, The Battle of Prestonpans Museum and Jacobite Heritage Centre commemorates the eponymous battle that took place in 1745. In the West Midlands, Stourbridge Glass Museum celebrates the town’s glassmaking heritage. The Barn Theatre and Museum near Hastings is home to a collection of toys, puppets, and theatre sets dating from the eighteenth century to the present. And in August 2022, the Yorkshire Natural History Museum opened in Sheffield.
Stourbridge Glass Museum
The three private museums include another on a nautical theme, Margate’s Crab Museum, which opened in 2021. The same year another local history museum opened, in Harwich, Essex. Displays include memorabilia from the popular 1980s TV show Hi-de-Hi!, which was filmed at a holiday camp nearby. On a more literary theme is Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein in Bath. The author lived in the city for a time and the museum is dedicated to Shelley and her famous creation.
These fifteen new museums join the fourteen openings in 2020–21 recorded in our previous blog on new museums in the pandemic. As mentioned in that blog, we did not anticipate so many new museums and expected instead to be recording more closures. With nineteen closures recorded altogether so far and twenty-nine openings, the sector has grown slightly during the pandemic. Could this be a sign of resilience, or might we record more closures before the end of 2022?
When museums began to reopen after lockdown restrictions were lifted in spring 2021, were there any differences between the four nations of the UK?
Our data gives slightly different pictures of the situation depending on how it is analysed. In one view, museums in England were more likely to reopen. In another, Scottish museums were more likely to reopen. Read on to find out more about our analysis.
Between March and November 2021, museum websites increasingly mentioned that they were open. That trend reflects the relaxation of lockdown restrictions. In April 2021, outdoor attractions began to reopen and museums in Scotland were able to reopen towards the end of the month. Museums in the rest of the UK were able to reopen in May 2021. This pattern can be seen in the chart below.
An upward trend can be observed in each nation, and all apart from Northern Ireland show a very similar amount of change. For England, mentions of opening increased by 9% (from almost 45% of museum websites, to 54%), and in Wales they increased by the same amount (from 35% to 44%). For Scotland, there was a slightly smaller increase of 8% (from 42% to 50%). In Northern Ireland the increase was smaller again at 6% (from 47% to 53%). Scotland and Wales show slight downturns at the end of the period, but it isn’t clear what the cause of this might be.
The picture looks somewhat different when examining indications of closure. The chart below shows the percentage of websites mentioning current closure between March and November 2021. As we might expect, the declining trend seen overall for mentions of closure is replicated here. For England, it declined by 17% (from almost 70% of museum websites, to 53%). For Scotland, there was just a 10% decline (from 64% to 54%), and this was the same in Wales (from 58% to 48%). In Northern Ireland, which has far fewer museums, the decline was slightly smaller at 7% (from 50% to 43%).
Mirroring the slight unexplained downturns in mentions of opening for Scottish and Welsh museums, here we see slight upticks for the same nations at the end of the period. But overall, reduced mentions of closure could suggest that, based on the language found on museum websites, museums in England were more likely to reopen than those elsewhere in the UK.
That finding is slightly complicated by manually checking samples of the text we found on museum websites. That textual analysis suggests that Scottish museums were slightly more likely to reopen. In April 2021 – before lockdown was lifted – we found that 556 museums in England explicitly stated that they were closed due to Covid, compared to 101 museums in Scotland, 44 museums in Wales, and 22 museums in Northern Ireland.
By September 2021, four months after restrictions had been relaxed, we found that 106 English museum websites still stated they were closed due to the pandemic, a reduction of 81% from April. By comparison, 16 Scottish museum websites still stated this, a slightly larger reduction of 84% over the same period. Museums in Wales and Northern Ireland showed a smaller reduction.
Although the numbers are quite different, museum websites in both countries mentioning closure due to Covid decreased by the same proportion, 73%. In Wales, 12 museums still mentioned this in September 2021, down from 44, while just six museums in Northern Ireland did so, down from 22. So this analysis suggests that Scottish museums were slightly more likely to reopen than those in England, and museums in Wales and Northern Ireland show lower rates of reopening.
These analyses by the nations of the UK all give slightly different views of the situation. Analysing mentions of opening on websites suggests that museums in England and Wales were very slightly more likely to reopen than those in Scotland, and museums in Northern Ireland the least likely to reopen. Analysing mentions of closure gives a different picture; one that suggests that English museums were more likely to reopen than those in other nations. But a closer analysis of website texts suggests a different picture again – that of Scottish museums being slightly more likely to reopen.
As lockdown restrictions were lifted in spring 2021, were there any variations in reopening between accredited and unaccredited museums, or between museums of different sizes?
Briefly, accredited museums were more likely to reopen after lockdown than unaccredited museums, and larger museums were more likely to reopen than smaller museums. Read on to find out more about our results and analysis.
Accreditation
Between March and November 2021, museum websites increasingly mentioned that they were open: a trend that reflects the relaxation of lockdown restrictions. This pattern can be seen in the chart below.
For accredited museums (orange line), mentions of being open rose by 10% (from 49% to 59%). Most of that change took place between April and June 2021, which was around the time that museums could reopen after lockdown. By contrast, mentions of being open rose by just 6% for unaccredited museums (from 40% to 46%). The greater change for accredited museums suggests that they were more likely to reopen than those that are unaccredited.
We can check the data on opening by comparing it with that on closing and, indeed, over this same period museum websites were less likely to mention that they were closed.
The chart above shows the percentage of websites mentioning current closure between March and November 2021. For accredited museums, this declined by 19% (from 77%, to 58% by November 2021). Again, a large part of that change took place between April and June 2021, although the situation was still changing noticeably until September. By contrast, for unaccredited museums mentions of closure on websites declined by just 10% (from 58% to 48%). That smaller decline in mentions of closure again suggests that accredited museums were more likely to reopen than those that are unaccredited.
As described in our previous blog on the relationship between governance and reopening, we also manually checked samples of the text we found on museum websites for statements of closure due to the pandemic. In April 2021 we found that 456 accredited museums explicitly stated that they were closed due to Covid, compared to 268 unaccredited museums.
By September 2021, four months after restrictions had been relaxed, we found that just 64 accredited museum websites still stated they were closed due to the pandemic, a reduction of 86% from April. By comparison, 76 unaccredited museums still stated this, a smaller reduction of 72%. So this analysis further confirms that accredited museums were more likely to have reopened, while unaccredited museums show a lower rate of reopening.
Size
The Mapping Museums database categorises the size of museums according to the number of annual visitors. Huge museums usually receive more than a million visitors a year, large museums between fifty thousand and a million, medium museums between ten thousand and fifty thousand, and small museums less than ten thousand. (read more on how we categorised museum sizes).
As seen in the chart below, museum websites increasingly mentioned that they were open between March and November 2021, and this change differs between museum sizes.
The larger a museum is, the more likely its website was to mention being open as this period progressed. For huge museums (orange line), there was an increase of 25% between March and September 2021 (from 67% to 92%), although this dipped to 83% in November. The sharp fluctuations observed in this group are to be expected when analysing the relatively small sample of twelve museums.
For large museums (blue line), websites using the language of opening had increased by 14% by November 2021 (from 56% to 70%, although it had almost reached that point by June). Medium museums (green line) showed a smaller increase of 10% (from 49% to 59%), and small museums (red line) showed an even smaller increase of 6% (from 39% to 45%).
As for accreditation, we can check the data on opening by comparing it with that on closing. Over the same period, as museums reopened mentions of closure on their websites decreased.
Huge museums showed the biggest reduction in the language of closure (from 100% in March 2021 to 67% by September). One of them, the National Portrait Gallery, closed in 2020 for refurbishment.
The smaller a museum is, the smaller the decline in the language of closure. Large museums declined by 21% (from 83%, to 62% by November 2021), while medium museums declined by 20% (from 76% to 56% by September 2021). Meanwhile small museums showed just an 11% decline (from 60% to 49% by November 2021). That change is about half of that for medium and large museums. This suggests that smaller museums were much less likely reopen than medium, large and huge museums.
To complement these summary analyses, we followed the same process outlined for accreditation by also manually checking samples of website text. In April 2021 we found just one huge museum that explicitly stated that it was closed due to Covid: this was Kelvingrove in Glasgow. There were 133 large museums making a similar statement, 230 medium museums, and 337 small museums.
By September 2021, we found that just 13 large museum websites still stated they were closed due to the pandemic, a reduction of 90% from April. The reduction for medium museums was slightly less at 86%, with 32 still making similar statements. The reduction for small museums was even less at 74%, with 87 still advertising closure. So this analysis of website text also confirms that the smaller a museum is, the less likely it was to have reopened.
Which museums re-opened after lockdown restrictions were lifted in spring 2021, and did it vary by governance? In this blog we present our findings about the three largest groups of museums in our dataset: those run by local authorities, independents run on a not-for-profit basis, and private museums.
As seen in the chart below, museum websites increasingly mentioned that they were open between March and November 2021. That trend reflects the relaxation of lockdown restrictions. In April 2021, outdoor attractions began to reopen and museums in Scotland were able to reopen towards the end of the month. Museums in the rest of the UK were able to reopen in May 2021.
% of museum websites mentioning current opening
Local authority museum websites (orange line) show the largest increase (from 44% in March 2021 to 56% in November 2021), which suggests that they are more likely to have reopened than the other two groups. The increase can be seen as early as April, which may reflect websites updating in anticipation of full reopening in May 2021. The change in April may also reflect the reopening of outdoor facilities across the UK that month, prior to full reopening in May. Independent not for profit museum websites (green line) show a smaller change (from 41%, to 49% by August 2021), and private museums (blue line) changed by a similar amount (from 36%, to 45% by November 2021).
Over the same period, museum websites decreasingly mentioned that they were closed.
% of museum websites mentioning current closure
The chart above shows the percentage of websites mentioning current closure between March and November 2021. The biggest drop is for local authority museums (from 77%, to 59% by August 2021), which again suggests that they are more likely to have reopened. That decline was slightly less on websites of independent not for profit museums (from 65% to 49% by September 2021). Private museums show the smallest change (from 49% to 44% by September 2021). This could suggest that private museums are least likely of the three groups to have reopened, but the chart of reopening above suggests that they were similar in this respect to not-for-profits.
Whether considering mentions of opening or closure, our summary website data suggests that local authority museums were the most likely to have reopened of these three groups of museums.
That finding is borne out by manually checking samples of the text we found on museum websites. In April 2021 – before lockdown was lifted – we found that 231 local authority museums explicitly stated that they were closed due to Covid, compared to 318 independent not for profit museums and 45 private museums.
By September 2021, four months after restrictions had been relaxed, we found that just 38 local authority museum websites still stated they were closed due to the pandemic, a reduction of 84% from April. By comparison, 72 not for profit independent museums still stated this, a smaller reduction of 77%. For private museums, 10 websites still stated they were closed due to the pandemic, a reduction of 78%. So this analysis also suggests that local authority museums were more likely to have reopened, while private museums and not-for-profits show lower rates of reopening.
These figures must be seen as approximate, given that not all museum websites are updated regularly and our search tools are far from perfect. But both types of analysis suggest that local authority museums were more likely to reopen after lockdown than the largest groups of independent museums.
When we set out to collect data on museums during the pandemic, we were eager to explore how long they remained closed and if they had reopened. The results were not what we expected and finding out why proved a more complicated process than we had anticipated.
To recall, we have built a web-scraping tool to identify words that indicate open/closed on museum websites. Monthly website snapshots allowed us to see how these indicators changed over time and the graph below plots the period between March and November 2021. As you can see, and as we might expect, the references to closure (the blue line) drop and the references to opening increase (the red line).
Thus, the data confirmed our general sense of what happened in this period, namely that museums re-opened after lockdown restrictions eased. However, we were surprised that these indicators stabilized from September onwards. Around half of UK museums websites continued to use language that indicated ‘closed’. Conversations with museum sector staff confirmed that many museums had decided to remain closed in 2021, but we still felt our findings were somewhat high.
We needed to know if the data was correct or if our software was malfunctioning, so we began to check results from individual websites. The result was reassuring in that our web-scraper had correctly identified ‘open’ and ‘closed’ terms. The problem was that the same language was used to describe a wide range of events or instances. For instance, websites announced that they were ‘closed for Christmas’ or that certain part of the museum complex, such as the café or galleries were closed. ‘Open’ was used in a similar way, such as in the case of online exhibitions.
We needed to distinguish between usages of ‘closed’, and so Andrea Ballatore, our resident software expert, designed a new piece of kit. This allowed us to search and analyze specific terms in their linguistic context. We looked at a sample of 1200 museum websites as they stood in September 2021, and in 167 instances the term indicated the site was closed specifically due to the pandemic (‘The museum remains closed due to Covid-19’) and in a further 212 instances, the museum was closed for an unspecified reason although the majority of these are also likely to be due to the pandemic (‘The museum continues to be closed’; ‘We have taken the decision to remain closed during 2021’). There were 42 museums closed for refurbishment and a further 12 references to seasonal closure.
Extrapolating from our sample, we can conservatively estimate that some 550 museums remained completely closed as of September 2021 for reasons connected to the pandemic, although it is likely that the number is likely to be higher. Beyond this, the other usages of closure we found referred to specific parts of a site (e.g. café, galleries), provided general information on opening and closing times, or less often, references to a museum’s history. That information is itself significant because it indicates that in addition to those museums that were entirely closed, many more museums were still experiencing some degree of closure. Large numbers of museums did not resume ordinary service.
In our future blogs we will be examining how those patterns of closure and re-opening varied according to museum governance and size, and presenting current data.
How have museums fared during the pandemic? What can we learn from their websites? And could we rapidly collect crucial information from museum websites to assess the state of the UK sector? These are the questions that have driven our research since the start of the project in January last year. We are delighted that we now have some answers to share.
Over the past few months we have been studying museum websites to find phrases that might indicate whether museums are at risk of closure. We collected these phrases together and created 6 key indicators. These are whether a museum is open currently or closed currently, has applied for or received funding, pursues online engagement, has staff working, or intends to reopen.
Our computer science team developed a tool to scan museum websites for references to these key phrases. We were able to scan websites for 3,300 museums of the 3,345 in our database. The graph below shows how these indicators changed from March to November 2021.
Each line in the graph shows a different indicator, and the higher a line is, the more museums were found with that indicator. The points on each line refer to a date when we collected data from websites.
So what does the data tell us?
The data suggests that a large proportion of UK museums made efforts to engage with audiences online, and their engagement remained relatively consistent across the period for which we have collected data. At this point in the pandemic, it is likely that museums who want to engage audiences in this way have developed the means and resources to do so. This tells us that over 80% of UK museums continued to function in some form in this period.
Another key point is that the indicator for closed currently begins to decline and open currently begins to increase from April 2021. These are generalized trends, but they appear to reflect a gradual reopening of museums. This is earlier than the 17th May reopening date for indoor museums. This early move of indicators is perhaps due to museums modifying their websites to indicate forthcoming reopening and also that museums in Scotland and museums with outdoor attractions were able to reopen earlier, such as English Heritage and National Trust properties. Similarly, the indicator for reopening intent peaks between April and May 2021, as museum websites likely reflected their forthcoming reopening plans.
Following the May reopening, an unexpected trend is that reopening intent doesn’t decrease significantly. This may be explained by the fact that although museums could reopen from 17th May, a number chose to remain closed beyond this point for a range of different reasons.
A final point of interest relates to funding. The graph indicates that less than a third of museum websites made any reference to funding, and this decreases after May 2021. As we noted in a previous blog, the emergency funding situation for museums was complex. A preliminary reading of this data may be that it shows a segment of museums appealing for funding or announcing successful applications. We may speculate that these are most likely independent not for profit museums, given that government museums may have been likely to furlough staff and not as reliant on covering additional outgoings. This will be explored further as we examine the data in greater detail in the forthcoming weeks.
Looking ahead
This graph is a snapshot of what the data can tell us. The six indicators can be analyzed across a range of museum characteristics (e.g. size, governance, location) allowing us to understand variance across the sector. In future blogs, we will present more detailed analyses of this data from museum websites. We continue to collect data, and this will enable us to present longer trends as we incorporate new data into our analysis.
As with any exercise that involves automated data collection from a large number of websites, the data is not perfect as we cannot be fully confident that we have accurately identified every museum website. Also, the six indicators are broad categories that span a very varied use of language on websites. Nonetheless we believe that this analysis shows a broadly representative picture of what is going on in the sector.
We have also designed new software that allows us to drill down into individual websites, which will allow us to fine tune our account, and we have gathered data from museum social media accounts (on Facebook and Twitter). We were able to collect that data over a much longer period, from 2019 until 2021, and that will likely reveal a more nuanced picture of the rush to online engagement at the outset of the pandemic and the first lockdown in March 2020. As 2022 progresses, we will present our findings in further blogs.
