 Hello and welcome everyone to today's webinar, Museum Lives in Post-Pandemia. My name is Mira Herschlein. I work for NIMO, the Network of European Museum Organizations. As the network for museums in Europe, our main activities are advocating for museums at EU level, providing training opportunities, providing a platform for museums to exchange and learn from each other, and help museums to cooperate across borders. In this function, NIMO felt it was necessary to document and analyze the impact of the coronavirus situation on the museums in Europe. In the past weeks, NIMO has carried out a survey to look at how museum budgets and operations have been affected, how museums cope in these times, how they reorganize their structures and offer new services to their audiences. Over 650 museums from over 41 countries have so far responded to the survey. You can find the first results and recommendations on NIMO's website. NIMO also recently created an interactive map with the re-openings of museums in Europe, or at least with the plans for the next steps. We will provide you with the link to this map after the webinar. We are now looking forward to today's webinar that will be facilitated by Sandra de Bono from Malta, a museum thinker and cultural strategist. Sandra's professional experience and commitments are quite extensive, so I leave the introduction to him once he starts the session. This webinar shall explore the ways and means how institutions can sustain relevance over these challenging times, how museums can keep sight of their community's needs and ambitions as these evolve and change over time. At the end of the webinar, you will have the opportunity to ask Q&A questions with the tech function. And I now head over to Sandra de Bono and wish you all a fruitful session. Good morning, everybody, and welcome. Hello from Malta. I'm Sandra de Bono. I'm a museum thinker and a cultural strategist, active based in Malta, but also active on the international field. My experience also includes a reading of a national museum, quite a tough challenge, which I delivered over 12 years, transforming the National Museum of Fine Arts in Malta into WUSA, a National Community Art Museum, where we also hosted the NEMO annual conference in 2018. Now I'm active much more in academia, and this COVID-19 situation was a golden opportunity for me to research and to understand trends and try to figure out how things might be changing or could be changing or will be changing in the coming weeks and months. I'm also active as an advisor with the Office of the President in Malta, and I'm quite active also in blogging. I run my blog publication, The Humanist Museum, and probably some of you might actually connect some of the ideas that we'll be discussing today to some of the blog posts that I was posting over the past few weeks. Museum lives in post-Penninia, and I think this is where we stand today. Museums are closed, they have to close in a very fast, very quick response. Most museums don't have time to plan anything and to figure out how they can react effectively and incisively to this situation. In a sense, we're all on the same page. Practically, the vast majority, the bulk of museums around the world are at this situation, and it has been a bit of a pandemic. It has been quite chaotic. Museums try to react to this situation that they never experienced before. They had to work behind closed doors and reach out their publics right outside, but with closed doors. So anything physically became literally irrelevant and what began to matter at very short notice were many other things, most of all the digital and the web experience. What is also interesting that most museums have been through this transition. I'm showing a chart it's known as the Kubler-Ross Curve. Kubler-Ross was a Swiss academic who researched transitions on patients, this comes from the medical field, transitions on patients who were terminally ill. So there are a number of phases where you are first caught in shock to really discover something that you are not expecting, and then patients would move on to accepting the situation. It would lead to depression or difficult circumstances, mental circumstances, and then they would move on to an experimental phase, to a decision phase, and to engage with the known, with the context, with the new context. This is a very interesting parallel to what museums have been through. They've been in shock at this situation. They've had to accept the state to school that the physical experience is no more. There were situations of depression, museums were getting lost, they didn't know what to do, they didn't know how to react. Then they began to experiment, some of them, and some of them came up with some very interesting things that I will be discussing as well as with today, deciding a way forward and engaging. Not all museums around the world are at the same stage of the Kubler-Ross Curve. Some of them have moved through this curve very fast, others are still struggling with accepting the state to school. What is sure in the circumstances is that we will not go back to where we were just a few weeks ago. It will be a new normal which we need to discover, which we need to understand, if possible, very quickly. Now things take time, it's not that easy, but perhaps through these discussions, through these debates, through all the information that has been provided by very many or very many social media platforms, we can actually find a way forward out of the situation. I would like to move on to this chart, which shows projections that have been mapped out by NEMO in this very insightful research survey that was made public a few weeks ago and with additional information that is being made available on Twitter, on social media, as we still move forward. I must remind you that this survey still, or has been still works in progress until a few days ago, so there is more information, more data that needs to be processed. From a certain, from an angle, from a particular angle, it's saying very much what we know. There's a loss of income, just know that the blue bar is the positive response, the yellow bar is the negative response, and the unsure answers are great. So we know there is a loss of income, there's a loss of income from the shops, income from ticketing sales, not so much loss of private funding, but what is interesting and what perhaps museums need to really think about is the alternative services and the needs to think about new financing models. As you can see, there are some who are considering this, there are others, and the yellow bar is quite dominant there, that are not. We might not get to a situation where we have the same funding that we had in a few weeks time that the patents that were there a few weeks ago might not be there now to support our programming, our outreach initiative and so on and so forth, so there is really the need to retain the funding models. But what is most important in all this is to reinvent the museum idea. That is the point of the project that we shall be discussing today. And our point of the project is also trying to understand what really made sense over the past two, three weeks from the from the pandemonium that we were going through and what we can already extract which is meaningful and which can be applied also without any financial, financial strengths on the on the on the institution. And I'd like to mention three examples that I thought were very insightful and I consider these to be insightful because practically the whole sector was moving very fast to go digitally, to try to create the right web interface to improve that interface and to be much more present online. But these three examples, two of them in particular, the third one has implications, has potential to be developed much more in the coming months and years to in the in the in the coming months and weeks to come. I thought we're very insightful. The first example comes from the LEM Museum in in the Netherlands. Now, this is I consider to be this museum as a very forward looking institution. It is an art museum. And it's collection is about food and consumption. They have a they have a website, but they decided to go for something which struck me as being very original. They decided to go for phone calls. In fact, they came up with a project called view phone where you would where the public would book a slot and you would receive a 10 minute call from from a curator and then that would be follow up that there would be a follow up with an email. So when everybody was going digital, these guys with some out of the box thinking decided to go the other way. And they were quite quite decisive, quite effective in reaching out to their audiences. Another example comes from Poland. This is the Poland Museum in Warsaw. It's a museum about the history of Polish Jews. And once again, the digital experience was there. The web interface, the web platforms were there. But instead, they also opted rather than they also chose to go for radio transmission. And this is a media which was also experimented in China. And there are Chinese Museums who ended up with three hour transitions and getting some 300,000, 400,000 people following these radio transmissions. The idea is so simple and yet they could reach out audiences in a very effective and very original way. These two examples, obviously, to not work in a vacuum, they were part of a bigger output, a bigger input to reach audiences. But my point at the stage is can these be developed further? Can these be one possible way forward for museums to think simple even with the budget constraints that all of us have and to come up with ideas how to reach audiences that might not be something which is a one size fits all? The third example which you know about is the Getty Art Challenge. I hope that some of you actually went for it. I didn't, but I'd love to at some point in time. I was busy following trends and researching all that was happening. I could see quite a variety of reactions. Obviously, this is a digital platform now and the platform made it possible for this challenge to reach all corners of the world. And you could get some interesting examples as the Salome holding the head of John the Baptist at the top, which is practically a replica or close to a replica of your little painting. And you could have a more informal, witty type of reaction to the early Renaissance icon in that particular collection, which is the image that you see at the lower end of the presentation. But what is interesting and I so far I haven't come across any research which builds on this very interesting initiative is that there is visual literacy in this. People were studying these paintings. They were looking at these paintings. They were trying to understand how the light falls on the texture of the clothing, on the figure and the composition in general. They were trying to replicate this. And I'm showing you a chart which refers to visual literacy studies. And you can actually connect some of the concepts that we study in visual literacy to what was happening with the Getty Art Challenge. People were evaluating the images. People were interpreting and analyzing the images. They were creating media. They were also finding images, obviously. So this could be an interesting potential for our museums to explore because it enriches the understanding of the collection. And it's also a way how to stay relevant at this point in time, but it could also a way how to actually provide education facilities and education platforms to your community. So three examples which I extracted out of the pandemonium of initiatives that can do hold potential, in my humble opinion, and which can be developed further. Now the question that most of us are asking is who is the audience now? We're accustomed to a situation where audiences would come through the main door of the museum and loads of studies. Most museums have the museum profile that's typical visitor, well-defined, and the ambitions as to what type of visitor profiling they would like to reach and so on and so forth. That is obviously not there at this point in time. And that is obviously the needs to understand if this new museum public, the museum public that will visit the post-COVID museum will still be. At this point in time, I don't know how many museums would pay to know what these two people are looking for on the screen. I mean, I'm taking it as a cue obviously, but loads of museums are trying to understand what their publics out there need. Some of them have reacted in a very interesting way. I know it is about one particular case where just a Google Sheet was being circulated and people were literally putting in their ideas, museum directors, museum people were putting in their ideas of who this hypothetical audience was, which I'm representing on the screen. You would have parents with children who would need a particular type of engagement, teachers most at sea trying to find information, people who are bored at home who don't know what to do and who might be interested in engaging with the museum experience, loads of things. Now there are surveys coming up which we shall be discussing them, which are a bit more insightful and which can help us build a new form of interaction, a new form of engagement for different types of museums. But going back to the Nemo survey, we know that 60% of European museums went digital, so that was the preferred choice for 60% of European museums and they actually shifted stuff, it did charts at the bottom, they actually shifted 30% of their staff working in the museum to work on the digital, on the web interface. Now obviously this is a challenge in itself because it doesn't mean that these staff were trained properly, have the right level of expertise to engage in the long term, so there's probably the need to retrain stuff here at this point in time. But some museums just focused and actually went to employ digital, employ someone to work on the online presence. Now this could be something which I'm sure could be increasing in the not too distant future, but what is important as well at this point in time is to understand the impact. How much is this having an impact on the public out there that museums have been trying to understand for the past weeks and this also comes up from the Nemo seminar and I thought this is very insightful. From those museums who replied to the survey, only 40% of museums who applied to the survey actually registered an increase in online activity, so from the whole spectrum of European museums active online and those who actually answered the survey, only 40% registered an increase and out of those 40% out of that segment 41% noticed a small increase and 10 to 20% increased. Does this mean that people are not engaging online? Does this mean that all this effort is not having the desired impact that museums thought they could have in the short term? There is an answer coming from the latest survey produced by published by the American Alliance of Museums and it actually confirms that it might be the case that people are not looking for the museum experience that we think they might be after and if I can comment on this screenshot, this survey gives some indications as to how publics are reacting. For example, some actually didn't even occur to them that they should be looking up museums or engaging with museums online. Some of them actually had no time because children were at home, they had to follow up on studies helping them with their homework, with their online work and so on and so forth. Anxiety which is becoming a problem as well. People are getting fed up staying inside so they wouldn't even want to think about museums. There is also the perception that museums are only there to provide information for children. Getting tired of screen time, you can stay so much in front of a screen and most of us probably are experiencing this. So this is very much what the reaction in America is and this comes up from a survey just published a few days ago. This does not mean that museums should not be engaging with content but it is perhaps the right time or we need to really think how, what type of content, what type of publics are waiting for this content, might be interested in this content and how to package it correctly. Last week, practically a few days ago, this survey, this data was published on social media and I think it is very indicative. This is Google Trend and this refers to the use of virtual museum tours and how people are engaging with virtual museum tours across the globe. This is a world trend, it's not focused specifically on the United States, it's the general trend worldwide. As you can see, there was a peak registered around late February early March, quite a spike. The first chart describes the situation for virtual museum tours between the first of January 2004 right up to where we are now. It's quite a chunk of time, close to 16 years and as you can see there was a spike, a very sharp spike on the use of virtual museum tours on access from all over the world for virtual museum tours but then dropped almost all of a sudden. Which means that although virtual museum tours are a very important tool, are a useful tool, it doesn't mean that museums can or should be relying just on that particular tool. It's just another tool from a toolbox that museums need to engage with the communities. I actually posted this on social media and a drone actually got in touch on Twitter and decided to make my work a little bit simpler and they reacted with this chart. I'm just going to summarize what this is all about because this data and this reaction to the museum virtual tours was published by Museum Hack and they took everyone by surprise away where some were not that much surprised but they actually discovered that there were three things that people are interested in and that was virtual field trips for kids, parents who want to engage with their kids using web interface, using museums to engage with kids. Quarantine data ideas, now this is very interesting, people are looking for dates and they're looking for social media platforms and information online and they were looking at museums to find their answers and things to read. So we compare how virtual museums tools, how virtual museum tours were actually performing and how the other three needs were actually registered. There's an interesting and interesting story there, the museum virtual tours actually peaked and they went low, not as low as they were before but they are part of a package that people are engaging with and as you can see quarantine data ideas are actually even more in demand and what Museum Hack rightly pointed out which I found also very very insightful is that things to read, people looking for information online is the trend that will survive, that will continue to grow and to develop further. As you can see the green graph is a constant, it has been on increase over a lengthy period of time so there is a constant increase and there is potential for this to get even better. So what are audiences after, what type of content can museums actually provide and this also comes from the American Alliance of Museums Research, the story poster just published. What is insightful is you've got obviously six categories, it's all about having fun, it's about discovery, it's about learning new things but it's not about the traditional visit, it's not about discovering a painting, it's not about discovering a collection or having an experience, it's about fun, do interesting activities, things that surprise and delight sharing hope and beauty, people essentially want to have fun, people want the museum to be a fun place even if it's just a click away, even if it's just a virtual experience. And what is being suggested is that information needs to be shorter, much more concise, much more content because people don't have time to read, they might be stressed out, they might have much more on the plate than just the museum experience or interested in visiting or engaging with a museum experience online, so bits and pieces of information contained which could actually be much more effective and this explains also what probably most of you are conversant with by now the hashtag the cowboy experience which comes from the National Cowboy Museum, they actually got the head of security to engage online and he was learning the ropes as he was engaging with his public and it was a huge success. It's not, it was not important what type of information, how academically correct that information was being provided, it was not important as to the packaging, as to how, how the, if the dates are correct or not, it was about experience, it was about a new form of engagement that people were not expecting that museum publics behind the screens were not accepting and I think this is a very good example which could have, have potential, I was having conversations with colleagues in Malta, Curatorial House Museum and I was actually discussing with her this, this possibility, how you can actually tell ghost stories, for example, which relates to, to the history of the place and you can make people curious, excited, not just online but also to visit once at the museum, once the Historic House Museum is open again to your, to your public. What about the coming months then? What should we be expected? Now obviously I have to put in my disclaimer, I'm not a prophet, I, I cannot predict the future but there are some interesting trends, some interesting, some interesting information that can help us understand how things might be evolving in the coming weeks and months. I've just actually tweeted a data sheet this morning which gives an update picture of, of the situation as to where museums will be reopening again and I think from that data and from that information that, that is being provided we know that by July, late July, practically the whole museum landscape, international museum landscape or most of it might be back again open accessible back to business. Obviously it will not be the same type of experience and we already have this information coming from China, we also have this information coming from museums in Northern Europe that actually remained open, stayed open and there are a number of restrictions that have been introduced. So masks obviously are, are mandatory, some in some instances museums are expected to accommodate just a maximum of 50% of the capacity they had before the COVID-19 pandemic. In China, for example, you have the obligation of presenting a certificate, a health certificate, the app, the app situation where the Chinese government is also, was also using apps to monitor the health, the, the, the state of health of, of, of the citizens. So this will certainly be, not be a return to normal, it will not be the place to show, to socialize, it will not be the place to, to, to, to go with your family, perhaps at this point in time, at the beginning, there are a number of restrictions. Now some museums might be, might be getting, might be getting frustrated and I perfectly understand that because if when fewer museums are accustomed to getting so much visitors and you end up with just 20 or 30, that is, that is frustrating. Actually, it might be the case that those, for those museums reopening the cost to run the museum would actually be higher than if they stay closed. I don't want to suggest this because museums are not there to make profit, they are there to, to service, to be there, they are institutions for the communities. So it's very important that museums look beyond this. But yes, from a business point of view, it could not make, it might not make sense at all. So what can be done, what are the possibilities and what type of information, what trends, what can we be expecting to happen in the coming weeks and months. A few days ago, we, we got this, this very interesting research published in, in the UK is the Alfa Attractions Recovery Tracker published by the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions in the UK. And it is indicative of what other, other countries might be, might be experiencing in the, in the coming weeks and months. If I can summarize the conclusions of the survey, it's a highly cautious market. People, publics would be dealing with, with, with fears of museums are the most important thing for them to, for, for museums to deal, it's very crucial to deal with, with fear. People who are fearful to return to a space that is closed rather than open, because it seems that the trend would be that people might prefer to go out in the open as, even if it's an open, a garden and zoo and an open space. So museums might need to think about their open spaces and much more in, in detail and obviously there is, there is the awareness that we need time to get it right. Museums need time to get it right because there is no one size fits all. This is, these are just trends. This is research being generated over a very particular span of time. There are research companies, agencies who are actually getting down to research every week to understand how things are evolving. There is the indication that people are willing to visit again because they've been inside for, for quite some time. So the willingness to visit is, is, is there and it's, it's increasing. But there is a sense of consciousness, which is to be, which is to be expected. So in this case, what this chart is saying is that we might expect a return to a normality of sorts in the coming five months. If we look closely at this chart, there is a very small percentage, just seven percent, who are keen on visiting over the next month once the museum is open. There is slightly more, which is interested in visiting between three, over the three to six months period. But we go beyond the 50 percent bracket if we think of return to a normality, to a new normality between six to 12 months. So the average is five months, five and a half months. We might be expecting a return of visitors, perhaps not to the, to the level that we had before, before the COVID, the COVID pandemic, but a return to normality will take time. That is essentially the point of this presentation. What would be the concerns? Again, quoting this survey, I mean, the highest ranking is being given to the need of a safe environment. Museum publics who will be visiting museums interested in going back to museums over the next five to six months would be absolutely very concerned, very keen on health and safety. They want to be sure that they are visiting, that they are experiencing a safe environment. And I think this is something to be expected. They are not after getting discounts in a way, even if discounts would help, they are not after or less after getting recognition for their loyalty. They are much more keen on health and health needs, health, health, health requirements. If we go by indoor and outdoor facilities, you can see that there is more concern with indoor spaces rather than outdoor spaces. Now, this obviously should get museums to think how they can actually bridge spaces that are open spaces within their remits, how they can use those spaces to balance, to buffer the increase or to push for or to facilitate the increase in visitors going inside their galleries or their halls or their exhibition spaces. I think obviously this certainly refers to the UK situation. It's very specific. It has to be taken as a survey carried out at this point in time. This was published just a few days ago. Things might be changing, but the trends are already indicative of what museums might be experiencing in the coming weeks and months. As I did mention earlier before, what came across clearly is that the data collected at a certain point in time, week one or week two, was gradually changing, was developing, or the indications that the survey of this data collected at week one or week two were developing, were changing, when the same data or the same approach was being taken three or four weeks later. So the situation is still a bit volatile. It's still uneasy. It's very difficult to predict trends, but these might be indicative of what European museums might be experiencing. What to do then? How can we deal with these situations? How can museums handle this situation where you have less visitors coming in? A social obligation to open your doors again and to welcome your visitors, your publics, perhaps new publics who might have discovered you online, others who might have heard of you, some who might not have been to visit for ages and who might have missed that visit or remember that there's your museum which is where is the time and where visit. How do we handle this? I think the point of the part of the most important thing is that we cannot go for just one tool. Digital, the web interface, the online interface is important, is necessary, but it is not the only tool that museums should be using. Because as we have seen with virtual tools, we had the peak and then suddenly that peak went almost back to where it was, slightly higher than before, but it was not the only solution. We have restrictions, museums have restrictions which they have to handle, so it's very important to think not just of one tool, but to think of a toolbox. What are the tools that we need to address the current situation? What are the tools that can help us develop new things? This is the right opportunity to develop new ideas, new projects. I was having a conversation with a colleague based in London a few days ago and he actually mentioned what Winston Churchill once said, never miss the opportunity of a crisis and this is it. There is opportunity in all that is happening around us. There is frustration, yes. There are challenges that museums need to tackle, to handle, but there are also very many opportunities. I'll briefly engage with three of these opportunities. I'll be going into more detail in my next blog post on the Humanist Museum, but for the time being on this platform, I'll just focus on three possibilities, three ideas that museums can engage with and can develop in a rather simple straightforward thing. I'd like to synthesize these three ideas with this image. In English we say, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. I see very much the situation that museums are currently in as being a situation of lemons. It's a sour taste that will not go away anytime soon, but there is an opportunity, as I was saying, to actually develop new ideas. I'm going to synthesize these three ideas with the lemon and lemonade approach. The first situation is that museum publics don't want to use handheld devices. This is a problem. Many museums have invested heavily in the hands-on experience, in the digital experience, touch screens, lots of interface. Some museums actually go just by that or it's a very important chunk of the experience that they provide. That is very fascinating because you have an investment that cannot be used, but there is an opportunity because at this point in time, there is a new museum netizen out there behind your screen who might not necessarily be interested straight away in what you are providing as we have seen before, but we still expect you to provide content and provide feedback. Now, with one of my latest blog posts, I do mention transmedia. Transmedia is a possible way forward on how museums can engage in this circumstance. This is it. You could actually invite people to visit your museum. You can have your ticket. You can actually provide the traditional tour per head and not having the digital content on the interactive experiences available, but those could be available online with the same ticket. They could also be exclusive for the visitor. You could actually be bridging the content, the online content that you would like to provide, which will be certainly all increased, and to bridge it with the physical experience of the visit. Your visit could start online. It is already the case, but this could be developed much further. There is much more potential. We do mention digital first. The first thing that you will do is to look up for information on your mobile, on your digital interface, but this could actually be the point of departure. It would be the seats for a new experience, which could bridge the virtual with the physical visit. People could actually visit your museum. They could perhaps engage online at first, trying to understand what your museum is all about, then visit your museum physically, and perhaps with that same ticket, they could actually download content that is part of the visit, which they can continue online after they have been to your museum. It's a time to test these possibilities. It's just one idea. I'm sure there are many more ideas out there being incubated, and I'm very looking forward to understand what most of you will be experimenting with the coming weeks and months. The second idea, the second lemon, is obviously visit their numbers. Visit their numbers are very low. This is far worse than we expected them to be, and this is the reaction I'm getting from colleagues in Serbia, from colleagues in Sweden, and other places. Obviously, it is not a positive thing. I mean, it is frustrating, but there is an opportunity in this. We can actually provide personalized tours, going much more personalized, and giving a special treat to those people who venture and are courageous enough to come to visit. Now, this is something which can also bridge with the LEM Museum experience in the Netherlands, where they actually call people over the phone, and they actually engage with them, starting off with an item in their collection. There is potential there. The LEM Museum experiment, I believe, I consider that to be a successful project. It is perhaps time to take it forward, to experiment more with that type of approach, and to bridge the physical, and to provide a physical experience that is much more focused, that is much more incisive, and which is much more human-centered. It goes much more, much more capillary. Obviously, this can also help gain trust. It can also help your situation to gain trust, and the confidence, and the comfort that your museum, your space, is a safe space. It is a space of solace. It is a place to visit, and it is a welcome space. Building trust with a very simple approach, starting off from LEM, and creating LME. The third and final example are masks. Most of us are expected to wear masks, even in Malta here. There is the obligation to wear a mask, and there are loads of health requirements and restrictions that museums will be expected to introduce. Now, this could also be an opportunity. How about providing personalized masks? I've seen masks featuring vanguards, some flowers, for example, but the potential is endless. It could be a trend. It could be a fashion. And museums can be very much active in all this. It could also be a situation where hygiene-related stories can be bridged with the experience, with the needs of the restrictions that are imposed, a painting which tells a story about hygiene or health issues or requirements, and the health restrictions and the health restrictions can actually bridge with this. I can see potential in all this. Obviously, it's about looking at the lemon as a potential glass of lemonade. The most important thing, and I'll be wrapping up my presentation in my webinar, with these three questions, is for museums to keep questioning themselves, to keep themselves in constant question. And I think now more than ever before, museums really need to think hard about these three questions. What do we stand for? This is something which I use very much in Malta when I was in the beginning of my 12-year project, the reading of the National Museum of Fine Arts. I used to tell my team, do we actually need a museum? That was the first question, because for now, we don't need one. But if we need a museum, then what type of museum? What does a museum stand for? What does your institution stand for? And by answering these questions, by trying to understand what you stand for, then you can engage with a new norm. You can be much more equipped to engage with a new norm. But we need to really think hard about this question. What do we stand for? And then for whom? Is a museum a tourist attraction? Is your museum there just for the community? Is it for both? Is it for something else? For whom? Because there's always this eternal relation that is always this very important, the electric between community and museums, which is public and museums, that sometimes we tend to put in second place. And this is a very important thing at this point of time. For whom do we are? Once museums understand for whom they stand, then they can actually come up with all the lemonade from the lemons that are available, that are fortunately on our table at this point in time. And then how to engage? How do we engage? There are loads of possibilities. There is no one size fits all. There is a toolbox, which we need to understand clearly what that toolbox will include. We need to understand the problem, the challenges, the opportunities, and then choose the right tools for our toolbox. And I think these are the three essential questions that museums need to ask. I've been getting quite a number of questions. I'll try to answer as many as I can. I'm really pleased with all your reactions. The first one is sometimes you think there is a correlation between the pessimism about the income or lack of data for financial vitality of museums and lack of hiring of knowledgeable staff to work on the digital. Should museum professionals gain more long-term vision? I think yes. I think it's a question of handling the situation, but not losing sight of the long term. This is something which also other museum expertise has been highlighting. It's important that we handle the current situation, but we all know that the situation that we're in will not last forever. We will be out of the woods hopefully sooner rather than later. So it's very important that we learn from the situation, that we understand what we can do better, where we can improve, what type of approach we can develop for a new norm. It is very important there. The second question coming from Franco Cavallieri, as income from both public and private actors will probably decrease some way, and so will incomes from shops, cafes, tickets. What are the sources of income do you see for your museums? Well, I think there is an opportunity there. If we go by, for example, non-governmental organizations who usually have a membership fee or would usually collect funds and money from local communities to create a project, this sense of ownership can actually create new revenue streams, new possibilities. We could also perhaps think of loans, no museums getting a loan from the community, however, trying to get funds from the community, from the larger public rather than from the one of the sponsors, from the mega-sponsors, or a hybrid of both. We don't have a quick fix for this. We still need to learn what the impact is going to be. I believe there is opportunity even in this, because going back to your public and asking for funding from your public, asking your community to help you out, especially if you were there to help them in times of need, might yield not just the funding and support, especially for small museums, because the bigger museums are a bit more complex to help them, but even the sense of bonding that is sometimes missing between the museum and its corresponding community. A question from Julia. What do you think is necessary in the museum? What kind of staff and resources to engage more digitally, as seen in the example in three museums? Also, what kind of infrastructure, skills, staff? Yes. I think, first and foremost, yes, there is the trend even at the Musa conference, where Imo was also active. There has been discussion of creating new museum profiles, and these four museum profiles are not mistaken, focused on the digital. There are other skills, some of the skills we might not even be aware of this point in time, that we need them, but there is the skill, there is the need of a skill, which is about engaging, which is about speaking a language which people understand. More than a skill, it's about a mindset, it's about a culture change. We need to rethink the way our publics understand or perceive museums to be all about. If I go back to the American Alliance of Museums survey, it does say a lot in this respect, that people are expecting a certain type of approach, a certain type of product or experience, and we think that the virtual tour is what the publics out there, the museum publics or the audiences might need. So, a better understanding, a culture change, new mindsets as to how to really engage with your publics, and I think these three questions are fundamental. What do we stand for? For who and how do we engage? These questions can create a number of profiles, which are more specific to the community, to the category or to the context to which that museum belongs. Another question from Mira, how the museum could see the future for us? Young new resources that are entering now in the reality of working in a museum. Do you think there is important changes that have to be taken in order to include us in this new scenario? Well, I think I'm hopeful that the younger generation will bring the, will usher in the change that museums need, and I think getting a younger staff, staff deployment to work in museums will certainly get museums to think beyond, to be innovative, to sometimes even risk. At this point, it's difficult to think of anything which is cast in stone. I mean, there is the actual survival of the museum as we have known it, but it might be the case that we need to change that, and I strongly believe that we should be changing that, we should be reinventing that into something that is much more human centered. And I think a younger audience can contribute, a younger staff intake can certainly, can certainly, can certainly contribute that. And I think it is where museums need to be more agile. Sometimes museums are understood, very often they are actually quite structured, quite difficult to engage with a situation where change is happening at such a fast rate. I was very surprised and I was positively surprised with the way museums have reacted in all this, because in all honesty, the reaction was quite fast. And I've seen some of the best ideas coming from smaller museums, from younger curators, from younger museum professionals, some of them I've met at we are museums or Nemo conferences and other platforms. I think the younger generation can really bring change. And one other question, have you, coming from, yes, Mira, one again, yes. Hi, Fembro, have you any advice for museums, communication managers to engage media in particular? Well, I think as we have seen, there is no one quick fix, there is no one size fits all. And I think there is a lot of experience out there that we can build on. There are museums that have been doing amazing things. It's a question of not just doing it for the physical visitor at this point in time. I think it's a question of rethinking how we look, how we understand who the visitor is, who the public is. There is a situation now, it was there before, but perhaps we are much more aware of it now, whereby the physical visitor would also be online. It's the same person or there is a healthy overlap there. So, creating content for just the virtual, for just the social media platform and not taking into consideration that this person could also be visiting or could be the one or the same person who is visiting is an important consideration. And I think the more multidisciplinary thinking is, the more we think of transmedia as a possibility, the more insight we can be. This is very much like, for example, Harry Potter, the Harry Potter book, you've got the book, you've got the film, you've got the products, all of them individually provide a unique experience. But collectively, they can bring a much better, more articulate, richer experience if experienced collectively. And this is how I believe social media for museums might need to work. It might need to work much more with exhibition curators, to bridge, it might need to work with other categories, other departments. The more the message guides a broader variety of media, the more incisive that message can be. I'll just take one last question. There are so many. I'm really pleased with all your reactions. Yes. And yes, one other question coming from, yes, from Marlen. Yes. Marlen asks, during this pandemic, social inequality became an even more visible and challenging issue. Poor families or elderly, not have easy access to digital resources when everything went digitally. What can museums do to address this? How can they enhance their social role, especially for vulnerable people? I think we've discussed some interesting case studies. And the Lam Museum example is a case in point. And the Poland Museum example, the regular transmission is also a good example. And at this point in time, what perhaps we need to understand clearly is how to pass on the message. There is a message, there is a vision, there is a narrative, there are stories to be told. There is the public on the other side. We have a vague idea at this point in time as to who this public is, what the expectations of the public are. It's a question of finding the right tools to transfer that message to the public out there. In the case of special needs or circumstances that people don't have, actually, that are not discriminatives or that are not conversant with technology, then it's a question of using traditional media. It could just be a letter sent to someone who visited the museum two months ago, three months ago, and just invite him back and just tell him what you're doing. I would be surprised to receive a letter from a museum inviting me to visit or telling what that museum is up to. I'd like to thank everyone for this hour. Thank you for finding time to follow me, to ask the questions that you have sent. I'm available on email. I'll be following this up on my blog publication with other posts. And wishing you good luck, stay safe, and hope you get inspired. Be inspired is my message. Thank you.