Categories
Museums in the Pandemic

Was there a ‘swing to the digital’? Museums and social media in the pandemic

Hands holding a tablet computer. On the screen is the word 'connect' with a grid of social media icons

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. 

A graph showing UK museums active on Facebook and Twitter, 2019–2021. The vertical axis shows the number of museums and the horizontal axis shows the years and months, from January 2019 until January 2022. The line for Facebook activity starts at roughly 1775 museums and ends at roughly the same level. Below is the line for Twitter, which starts at roughly 1650 museums and ends at roughly 1450. For both, activity peaks in April 2020, during the first UK lockdown.

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. 

A graph showing UK museum social media posting activity on Facebook and Twitter, 2019–2021. The vertical axis shows the number of posts or tweets and the horizontal axis shows the years and months, from January 2019 until January 2022. The line for Twitter activity starts at just under 70,000 tweets and ends at roughly 50,000 tweets. Below is the line for Facebook, which starts at just over 30,000 posts and ends at a slightly higher level. For Twitter, activity peaks sharply in May 2020, during the first UK lockdown, and tails off from there. Facebook ativity is more even across the period, with the lowest level in February 2021.

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.

Katerina Mityurova

[Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash]

 

Categories
Events

The UK Museums Boom (and what happened next)

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.

Categories
Museums in the Pandemic

More openings and closings in the pandemic

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. 

Interior of the Museum of Army Music. Glass cases display uniforms, flags, instruments and other items.
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). 

Interior of the boat shed at Grimsay Boat Haven. From front to back, a weathered dark green wooden dinghy, a much newer boat painted in dark blue and red, and a third boat with a rubber buoy resting on top.
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.

The front of Stourbridge Glass Museum, a modern building with white walls, glass frontage to the left. To the right an older brick building with a conical brick kiln rising above it.
Stourbridge Glass Museum
The logo of Yorkshre Natural History Museum. Illustrations of a dolphin swimming above a plesiosaur with water bubbles, a red plant and a starfish.

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? 

Mark Liebenrood 

[All images courtesy of the museums. Header image by Jan Tinneberg on Unsplash.] 

Categories
Museums in the Pandemic

Museum reopening after lockdown in the UK nations

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. 

A chart showing the percentage of museums whose websites mentioned that they were open, categorised into the four UK nations, between March and November 2021. The trend for all four nations is an increase, with slight differences that are explained in the accompanying text.

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%). 

A chart showing the percentage of museums whose websites mentioned that they were closed, categorised into the four UK nations, between March and November 2021. The trend for all four nations is a decrease, with slight differences that are explained in the accompanying text.

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. 

Mark Liebenrood

Categories
Museums in the Pandemic

Accreditation, size, and museum reopening after lockdown

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. 

A chart showing the percentage of accredited and unaccredited museums whose websites mentioned that they were open, between March and November 2021. The trend for both types is a slight increase.

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.  

A chart showing the percentage of accredited and unaccredited museums whose websites mentioned that they were closed, between March and November 2021. The trend for both types is a significant decrease.

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. 

A chart showing the percentage of museums whose websites mentioned that they were open, categorised into four sizes, between March and November 2021. The trend for all four sizes is an increase, with smaller museums showing the smallest.

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. 

A chart showing the percentage of museums whose websites mentioned that they were closed, categorised into four sizes, between March and November 2021. The trend for all four sizes is a decrease, with smaller museums showing the smallest decrease.

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. 

Mark Liebenrood 

Categories
Museums in the Pandemic

Museum governance and reopening after lockdown

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. 

A chart showing a gradual increase in mentions of reopening on museum websites between March and November 2021, for local authorities, independent not-for-profits, and private museums.
% 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.

A chart showing a gradual decrease in mentions of closure on museum websites between March and November 2021, for local authorities, independent not-for-profits, and private museums.
% 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.

Mark Liebenrood

Categories
Museums in the Pandemic

Long closures after lockdown

A rusted padlock hangs from a hasp that secures a wooden door. Cracking and dirt in the woodgrain are clearly visible.

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).  

A graph showing indicators of museum website language during 2021. The vertical axis shows the number of museums. The horizontal axis shows the date the websites were accessed. There are six lines on the graph. From top to bottom, a green line shows online engagement; a purple line shows intent to reopen; a blue line shows closed currently; a red line shows open currently; a brown line shows staff working; a yellow line shows funding. The lines are explained in more detail in the text of this blog post.

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.  

Jamie Larkin and Fiona Candlin 

[Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash]

Categories
Museums in the Pandemic

Museum websites: What can they tell us?

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.

Jamie Larkin & Mark Liebenrood

Categories
Museums in the Pandemic

New museums opening during the pandemic

The words Museum Open formed from letterpress type

When we began the Museums in the Pandemic project, we anticipated that some museums might be forced to close permanently as a result of pandemic restrictions. What we didn’t anticipate is that so many new museums would open during this period. As far as we know, fourteen museums have opened between March 2020 and September 2021. Five opened in 2020 and nine new museums have opened so far this year. Two are run by local authorities, while the rest are independent. Most of the museums were at least at the planning stage before the pandemic began, although in some cases we have not been able to determine when their development initially began.

After the pandemic was officially declared, the first new museum to open was forced to close just a few days later with the announcement of the initial nationwide lockdown in the UK. This was the Malton and Norton Heritage Centre in North Yorkshire, which displays the Woodhams Stone Collection. The collection is an amalgamation of two separate collections acquired by Sid Woodhams, a former curator at Beck Isle Museum in Pickering, and John Stone, former Mayor of Norton, who are long-term friends. Work began on refurbishing a bookmakers’ shop to provide accommodation for the heritage centre in Autumn 2019, and it opened briefly in March 2020 before having to shut its doors.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the planned openings were delayed by lockdowns. The first museum to be affected was The River Tweed Salmon Fishing Museum.  It was due to open in May 2020, but the pandemic put paid to those plans and it eventually opened four months later. Based in Kelso, Scotland, the museum was in development for three years by a group of volunteers and tells the story of the fishing techniques that developed in the area and their influence on the development of the Eastern Borders. The displays combine items from several private collections.

A single storey wooden clad building at an angle to us, with a door and three windows. A red sign on the end wall that reads Radlett & District Museum
Radlett and District Museum. Photo courtesy of the museum.

The last museum to open in 2020 was also delayed by the pandemic. The Radlett and District Museum in Hertfordshire is run by the Radlett Archives Group, a Charitable Incorporated Organisation. They initially kept their archives in the local library, but now have permanent, purpose-built premises at the rear of the village institute. The building was constructed in January 2020 but fitting out the museum was held up by the first lockdown. Work resumed in the summer and the museum opened in October 2020. In common with other museums, they were forced to close for the second and third lockdowns but are now open two days a week.

No fewer than three museums opened in May 2021 and all of them had been some years in development. In London’s Covent Garden, Bow Street Police Museum occupies part of the former Bow Street Police Station, which closed in 1992. The adjacent magistrate’s court closed in 2006 and a hotel developer purchased the empty building in 2017. As a condition of granting planning permission for the hotel, Westminster City Council stipulated that a museum be created on the site. An independent curator was commissioned in 2019 and the museum, run by a charity, opened less than two years later.

A cell inside the Bow Street Police Museum. Above a narrow dark wooden bench are displays of photographs and text.
A cell display at Bow Street Police Museum. Photo by Matt Brown

Also in London, Southwark Council redisplayed some of the collection formerly on show in the Cuming Museum, which closed in 2013 after a fire, in the new Southwark Heritage Centre & Walworth Library. Objects are displayed in cases throughout the library, but there is also a separate gallery dedicated to the borough’s heritage. Originally intended to be completed in December 2020, the opening was postponed by five months although it is unclear whether the delay was due to the pandemic.

The third museum to open in May was The Great British Car Journey in Derbyshire. The brainchild of Richard Usher, the collection of cars designed and made in Britain began with an offer of a single car and over the course of four years grew to almost 150 vehicles. The cars are displayed chronologically and around thirty-two are available for visitors to drive. The museum was originally scheduled to open in 2020, but two of the founders faced health problems and the pandemic also contributed to the delay.

The following month, a small local authority museum opened in at the town hall in Leigh, Greater Manchester. The town hall houses the archives of Wigan Borough Council and has undergone a major refurbishment. Originally due to be completed in April 2020, the project was significantly delayed by the pandemic and the town hall eventually reopened in June 2021. Objects from the archives are displayed in a new purpose-built exhibition space that illustrates the history and culture of the borough.

Displays at the Archives Exhibition in Leigh Town Hall. Display panels surround a black metal spinning wheel. An old barber's chair can be seen behind.
Leigh Town Hall Archives Exhibition. Photo by Mark Liebenrood

A major new museum in the Scottish Borders also opened in June 2021, after years of planning. The Great Tapestry of Scotland, in Galashiels, displays a 160-panel tapestry that tells a people’s story of Scotland. A thousand stitchers contributed to the project, which was originally the idea of author Alexander McCall Smith. The tapestry itself first went on show in 2013 and toured a number of venues in Scotland. Plans for a permanent home were in development from 2014 and Galashiels was chosen as the site in 2016. The museum is part of plans to regenerate the town and received capital funding from various bodies including the Scottish Government.

Three museums focused on railway heritage opened in August and September, and all of them were in development well before the pandemic began. A new museum inside Glasgow Central railway station opened in August, having been planned since at least 2019. Developed in collaboration with students from the Glasgow School of Art, the museum tells the story of the station from 1879 with a wide range of objects. Unlike the other museums mentioned here, which are all directly open to the public, this one is only accessible during guided tours of the station.

Interior of Glasgow Central Station Museum. On the left wall is a large illuminated station clock, and on the right wall are lamps, signals and other objects.
Glasgow Central Station Museum. Photo courtesy of Network Rail

Along similar lines is the Doncaster Rail Heritage Centre, which opened in September after years of planning by Heritage Doncaster. The Centre is housed in the Danum complex that includes a library and two other museums, and the core of the collection comes from Doncaster Grammar School’s Railway Society, which began collecting in 1948. The National Railway Museum has loaned two locomotives, both built in Doncaster, to complement the other exhibits.

The most recent of these railway museums to open is in Bishop’s Castle, Shropshire. The Weighbridge Museum is the result of years of work by the Bishop’s Castle Railway Heritage Society. The project began in 2017 with a derelict weighbridge building, and after sustained effort from a group of volunteers and some professional builders, the museum opened in September 2021. It records the history of the Bishop’s Castle Railway, opened in 1865, that joined the town to Craven Arms, ten miles away.

There are a few museums that opened in this period where we know much less about how long they were in development before opening. One was the first new museum to open after the initial UK lockdown was lifted. It is dedicated to the footballer Duncan Edwards, and opened in Dudley in the West Midlands in August 2020. Situated above a shop and run by a charitable foundation that was founded two years earlier, the museum tells the story of Edwards, who played for Manchester United. He was amongst the team members in the 1958 Munich air crash and died in hospital fifteen days later at the age of twenty-one. The museum includes a display on the Munich disaster and period rooms focussed on Edwards’ life.

Also opened in August 2020 was a new museum devoted to Cockney Heritage. It was founded by George Major, the Pearly King of Peckham. It isn’t clear how long George had been planning the museum for, but he began collecting cockney heritage sixty years ago after becoming concerned about that heritage being lost. The museum features a mock-up of a nineteenth-century street and a display of pearly king and queen suits adorned with mother-of-pearl buttons. Traditionally a cockney is anyone born within the sound of London’s Bow Bells, but the Original Cockney Museum is in Epsom, Surrey, a site chosen for its much lower running costs than central London.

Exterior of the National Film and Science Fiction Museum in Milton Keynes. A two-storey building in stone or concrete, with large windows. Through an upstairs window can be seen figures including a dinosaur, Kung Fu Panda and a silver dalek.
The National Film and Science Fiction Museum in Milton Keynes. Photo courtesy of the museum.

Lastly, Milton Keynes gained a new independent museum in August 2021 with the opening of the National Film and Sci-Fi Museum. Building work was underway in December 2020, but we don’t know how long the museum was in development before that. The collection includes costumes, props, and images from film and television productions including Star Wars, James Bond, and Harry Potter. Run by a charity, the museum is also connected to a company that runs events for film and comics fans.

The pandemic has doubtless presented numerous challenges to museums, but it has not prevented many new museum projects from coming to fruition. Some of them had been in development for years, with the collection now on show at the Malton and Norton Heritage Centre being formally established a decade earlier and the Great Tapestry of Scotland first going on show in 2013. Other projects have had shorter timescales, but many of them have been delayed by lockdowns. We began our research into this period expecting it to be marked by permanent closures, so it has been a welcome surprise to see so many museums opening.

Mark Liebenrood

(header image by Leo Reynolds)

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Lab News

Mapping Museums is Dead. Long Live Mapping Museums

The Mapping Museums Team in a Microsoft Teams meeting. Clockwise from top left: Fiona Candlin, Val Katerinchuk, Jamie Larkin, Mark Liebenrood (inset), Alexandra Poulovassilis, Andrea Ballatore.
The Mapping Museums Team in a Microsoft Teams meeting. Clockwise from top left: Fiona Candlin, Val Katerinchuk, Jamie Larkin, Mark Liebenrood (inset), Alexandra Poulovassilis, Andrea Ballatore.

(Header image: The Mapping Museums team in an online meeting. Clockwise from top left: Fiona Candlin, Val Katerinchuk, Jamie Larkin, Mark Liebenrood (inset), Alexandra Poulovassilis, Andrea Ballatore)

Today marks the official end of the Mapping Museums research project. There were certainly times when I thought that we’d never finish. The process of collecting information on museums open in the UK since 1960 sometimes felt interminable, and I began to regret museums opening almost as much as them closing because it means we had to enter them into the database. Writing the report on data, a statistical analysis of changes within the UK museum sector, seemed to take years, as did my attempts to work out local authority hierarchies across the UK. I could have happily skipped those learning curves. And I think my colleagues felt similarly as they collected and checked museum details, created visualisations of data, discovered and fixed bugs in the system, and coded hundreds of thousands of words of interview transcripts.

It has been a huge and at times trying enterprise. Yet the moments of complaint were utterly outweighed by the pleasures of the research. I’ve learned a lot and seen how quantitative and qualitative research can be mutually informative and how interdisciplinarity can push research in new directions. In developing data and data visualisations, I’ve been forced to think more precisely than before about how museums are defined and classified, and the ethics of doing so. My sense of the UK museum sector has changed. I stopped thinking of it as a relatively bounded and stable territory and started seeing it as a mass of overlapping entities that chopped and churned. I’d never really thought about museums closing before, whereas now they seem to be much more fragile entities. And the interview-based work made me rethink the whole notion of a museum founder: not only the notion of the individual founder beloved of conventional institutional narratives, but the DIY curator that features in popular journalism and grass roots histories.

I am also enormously proud of what we have collectively achieved. If you haven’t already, do please have a look at the website, which provides access to a searchable database of over 4000 museums, the project report, articles, and many other resources including transcripts of interviews at around fifty small museums. The final monograph, provisionally titled ‘The People’s Museums’ is finished pending peer reviews and, fingers crossed, will be published sometime next year.

That work has depended heavily on the interest, input, and forbearance of too many people to name, although I would like to thank three groups and one individual who have been particularly important: the Museum Development Officers who questioned, checked, and contributed to our data; the hundreds of museum volunteers and staff members who explained how and why they set up their own museums; the Advisory Board who helped us negotiate the museum sector; and Phil Gregg made sure the systems were maintained and that we didn’t lose our data. We are very grateful to all of them. And at the risk of lapsing into an Oscars-style speech, I’d also like to take the opportunity to thank my colleagues in the research team: Andrea Ballatore, Toby Butler, Val Katerinchuk, Jamie Larkin, Nick Larsson, Mark Liebenrood, Jake Watts, and especially the Co-Investigator Alexandra Poulovassilis. It really has been a pleasure to work with such an expert and committed group of people. For me, the project has been more than the sum of its parts: something that only happens when there is genuine collaboration.

Mapping Museums is dead but Mapping Museums lives on. We are working to keep the database up to date for as long as possible. It has been widely used and we want to keep it operational. Doing so depends in part on the ongoing contribution of others, so please carry on sending us updates and edits (contact us here). Several of us are also continuing to work together on the new ‘Museums in the Pandemic’ research project. That will conclude in the summer of 2022 with a report that leads on from the Mapping Museums research. We hope to launch the publication with a seminar and party to make up for the one that we missed in March 2020. You are all invited.

Fiona Candlin