 to you, our host, Susan Berger, on behalf of the F-A-I-C. Go ahead, Susan. OK, hi, everyone. I'm unwelcoming you. And I see that it's tropical in North Dakota while it's snowing in New Mexico, although it'll probably be evaporated by tomorrow. There is a handout. It's right below the general chat box. So please avail yourself of that. And just to remind you, when the advertisement for this webinar is no longer on the front page of our website, you will find the recording and everything else in the archive. The best way to keep in touch with Connecting to Collections Care is to join our Lister, which is just for announcements. It's one or two announcements a month, that's it. Or you can like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. If you need help due to a disaster, this is the 24-hour, seven-day-a-week disaster line. So that's available to you. And our discussion forum has moved. And it's now the Connecting to Collections Care community on the AIC website. You can join. You can look for the instructions on our website. And it's free. And you can always contact me. This is my email address. And coming up the end of this month, we're going to do something on caring for plastics. And then in the middle of December, we're going to do something on packing and creating basics. And that will be the end of the year for us. And we will be working on new things for you in January and on into 2019. I know in January, we're going to do something on microclimate, so you can look forward to that. And now I'm going to turn this over to Janice Klein. And we're going to start today's webinar. Hi, thank you, Susan. I can't say I'm really delighted to talk about this subject. But it's one that I have a little bit of experience with. Most of you have probably read my bio blurb on the executive director of the Museum Association of Arizona. Prior to that, I did consulting for small museums and collections management. Prior to that, I worked at a small museum in the Chicago area. And before that, a very big museum in the Chicago area as registrar at the Field Museum and then executive director of the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian. And I have worked with the AAM Registrar's Committee, Small Museum Administrators Committee, and various other organizations. One of the jobs I had as a consultant was to work with the Arizona Science Center after they had taken over the building and collections of the Phoenix Museum of History. The Phoenix Museum of History closed in 2009. And that's the closing that I am most familiar with. But I have gotten information from another of colleagues. I want to start by thanking them, these are the people who have provided information about closing museums and helped shape some of the way I think about it. Pat Miller got me started by raising a question of how to close a museum on the registrar's list serve about five years ago. And that resulted in a session that I organized for AAM 2016, where Gary Smith was a key participant. And I'd also like to thank Brian Crockett, who is not a two-headed goat. That is the name he uses for his company. For being part of that session, and if you know Brian, you know that he was able to supply some light relief on this very serious subject. Mark Hanson, who is now at the Museum of the Grand Prairie, spent many hours on the phone with me sharing his first-hand experience as the last director of the Chanute Air Museum in Illinois. And there have been many others who worked in museums that closed, but shared directly or indirectly their experience and insights. So some of you may know the source of this quote, but don't let that stand in the way of appreciating it. As most of you are aware, closing a museum is a topic that is not much discussed. There's some anecdotal information gleaned from what is made public or from what we can discover from private conversations about what has happened with individual museums. There are a few what I call semi-analyses that have attempted to draw conclusions from the little bit of data we do have. And most of the ones that I have found are on your handout of resources making a good end. And then there are a few sets of guidelines, the most formal of which is the ethics position paper when a museum closes that was published by the American Association for State and Local History in 2007. And as you will see as we progress, many of the ethics statements that have to do with the accessioning also pertain to some extent to closing museums. So these are some of the questions that we are thinking about. We're thinking about how many museums close each year, what happens to the collections, how do we recognize the warning sign. So how many museums in the United States do close each year? Not surprisingly, there is very little hard data on closing museums. The Institute for Museum and Library Services, as we know, attempted to count of how many museums there were in the United States about five years ago. They came up with a 35,000 as the total. Some of us think it's somewhat closer to 20 or 25,000. But there's never been a formal assessment of how many museums close each year in the United States and certainly much less on the effect of those closings. So what we have is a little bit of information. If you Google defunct museums, this is the Wikipedia page on defunct museums in the United States. It provides links to a little over 200 museums that, as of 2017, were listed in Wikipedia as being closed. In 2016, Kansas University Museum study student did a research paper, which is also listed on your handout, in which she said there were 50 museums that had closed in the last 10 years. And in an article about the closing of the American Textile History Museum in 2016, they listed 10 museums that had closed. So we have some anecdotal information, but again, no hard data. As a comparison, according to a British Museum Association study conducted in 2015, nearly one in five regional museums had closed, at least part of their museum to the public in the previous year are planned such a closure in the year to come. Another count identified 44 British museums that have closed since 2010. The Brits have also done a little bit of research on the topic, looking at closures of museums over time and the different types of museums that have closed by governance type. Interestingly, the car museum people have also been paying attention to how many museums closed. And there was an article in May 2018 with a lot of information about the closure of car museums. And I just want to give a shout out for that image. It is from a microcar museum. And those of you who may know about microcars, we are enthusiasts in this household, so I wanted to get those pictures in. Moving from the known unknowns, this is what we, I'm sorry, and this should say this should be the unknown unknowns. We don't know what happens to museum collections long term. We don't know how museum closings affect donations and funding for museums overall. What does the publicity do? How it affects the museum's community. And we really don't know what kind of difference there may be in type of museum governance, in museum area, rural versus urban, or whether there are differences in subject matter in which museums close. So for today, we're going to try to focus on some of the things we know something about and some of the things we don't know anything about. I try in this webinar to at least let you know what we know about and what we don't know and where we need more information and analysis. I've included a number of real life examples of museum closings where relevant. I haven't actually gone through any museum closing from start to finish. I've only made reference to those museums. Most of them do not write up what has happened from start to finish, and so most of the information is anecdotal. Often taken from the internet, but in a few cases, I have had the opportunity to actually talk to people who were involved. And sometimes they've told me things that they would prefer not be public. So it is going to be limited inside information in some of these examples. So why do museums close? First, there are financial issues. Many museums have long-term issues where the board's museum's board has not been able to raise enough money or identify enough sources of income to cover the museum's basic costs. Very often, a museum will limp along for many years just about making do or cutting down on what they do little by little until it is hit by a major budget disruption. And very often, that's in the form of the second issue, the loss of government or foundation support. State county and municipal governments have been cutting money going to museums for a long time. That's nothing new. But this became a major issue when the Great Recession hit in 2008. At that time, foundation income also took a hit. And so there was less money available from those sources as well. With the Phoenix Museum of History, the city of Phoenix was subsidizing the museum with $50,000 a year, which was about 15% of the museum's overall budget. When they cut that in 2008, they created a gap that the board could not fill with additional fundraising. They were a museum that, in fact, was just meeting its budget. And that 15% really knocked them out. The Chinute Air Museum in Illinois, there was a change in the local demographics. And the city paid attention to who was living there now as opposed to the historic population, changed their priorities, and decided not only would they want to charge a fair market value for the space that the museum was taking, but also just continue the utility subsidy. In total, this would have added $65,000 a month to the museum's operating cost at this was a very small museum with operating costs of under $200,000 a year. Long-term debt happened over a period of time as the museum continually revised on its reserve. But it can also be the result of a miscalculation as part of a major building or other expansion project where the money is borrowed against the expectation of increased income from increased visitation once the project is realized. And that is very much if we build it, they will come. And unfortunately, quite often, if museums build it, they don't get that bump in attendance. They don't get that bump in interest. And they don't have the reserves to cover that debt. I didn't list here the loss of a museum's building, which can happen for a number of reasons, whether they don't own the building themselves and the actual owner sells it out from under them, or they have a debt that had, in one case, the West Valley Art Museum here in Arizona unwisely put up its building and land as collateral with a series of bank closures. That museum ended up having to sell the museum in order to pay its debts. But it was able to continue, as many museums are when they leave their buildings with an alternative space provided by the city of Peoria. So it doesn't always result in a closure, but can be the final blow when a museum has financial issues. And that was the case with the recent closing of the Museum of Biblical Art. Museums also close because of a lack of human support, whether in the form of people willing to serve on the board to volunteer or even visit the museum. But this is much, much harder to quantify than financial needs. For smaller museums, they often do things like reducing operating hours or depending on the very few supporters to keep the building open, like that proverbial person who lives next door with the key to the building. Some of my colleagues have referred to these as zombie museums that can continue almost indefinitely until the last person who has the key dies. And then it creates some major issues in terms of how to properly close the museum. Larger museums that have dwindling support can do some things like reducing operating hours or curtailing programs, but they will eventually incur financial difficulties as well. When it comes to mission, no one really wants to admit that their main focus is no longer relevant to there or any community. But this may happen when boards don't do what one of the things that they should do, which is to review and revise their missions on a regular basis. Some boards will say, we're doing fine. And until there is a real drop because the needs of the community or the organization or the community demographics have changed, they then take a look at the mission and say, do we have time? Let's hope we can do that before we're out of money. Historic houses have been looking at redefining and expanding their mission over the last few years as a discussion point in a number of workshops, blogs, and articles that have focused on rethinking the historic house. When we come to when to close, this is a real challenge. The AASLH ethics position paper says, should be made at the earliest point in time after all alternatives have been weighed. But closing a museum has a huge emotional component to it. And like ending a co-dependent relationship or telling an older relative that it is no longer safe to live alone, it's very painful to do, and we usually wait too long. Most museum boards are reluctant to acknowledge that there is a problem. However, it is important for them to identify that there is a major difficulty, whether in funding or other support, as soon as it is recognized. And this will allow the board and staff members to take those what might in other times seem to be extraordinary or extreme measures to cut costs, like being closed more, cutting staff, cutting programs, and to ask for financial or political help. But it also makes sure that the stakeholders know what's going on and discusses them in the consideration of possible options. Declaring a crisis also gives the board a chance to see if there are supporters who step forward to help that they may not have thought of. This image is a post on the museum bead, on the BeadL website, that the Bead Museum in Glendale posted, their board first raised financial concerns in April 2009. They launched an aggressive fundraising drive that brought in nearly $200,000 by the year's end, and the museum also cut its expenses nearly in half. But the museum continued to have a monthly shortfall of $7,000 and ultimately closed in March 2011. They probably are among the museums that started earliest in terms of figuring out what to do. And I use them as an example in a number of instances of how to do this right. Among the calls to help they put out was to the National List Serve for Bead Collectors. And that resulted in a number of donations, including one from the Society for Bead Research that had not known there was a problem. Contrary to that, or in opposition to that, when the Museum of Biblical Art closed, they didn't do this. But they heard afterwards from potential donors who said, you should have let me know I might have been able to help. So while you don't want to pull the plug too soon, it really is important to start talking about the problems that might lead to a closure as soon as possible. So what are the factors that museums should look at when deciding to close? Well, once museum is closed, the staff is gone. They have moved on to other places. They need to have paid positions. So the final disposition of the collection really should begin to happen when the staff is there to work on the variety of collections issues that we'll talk about in a minute. This requires, it may require or usually requires, extensive research to determine title and is best done by those who are most familiar with the collections and the documentation. The physical transfer of the collection, including things like packing everything up and transporting it, is also best done by those who are professionally trained to do this work. When the staff is gone, you may have wonderful volunteers and you would have the board, but they're starting from the beginning in terms of ability to take care of collections. You should be as transparent as possible, both internally and externally. We've talked about letting people know that there's a problem as soon as it's reasonable. Obviously, you can't close a museum in secret, although some people try. This does damage the relationship with the staff, the supporters, and the general public. Although we really don't know how much that is, we do have some anecdotal evidence that I'll talk about later on that suggests if you don't tell people what's going on, they usually guess the worst. Closing a museum costs money. You usually think of closing a museum as being the end of spending money, but waiting until the last possible moment to close can result in the very real risk of incurring more debt, or debt if you don't already have it, which has an adverse impact on the disposition of the collections. And we'll get to that in a minute, too. The American Textile History Museum actually continued to solicit donations after they decided to close to support the thousands of curatorial hours necessary to ensure the proper care of collections as they are prepared to be transferred to other organizations. So it is okay to say we're closing, but we need money to do it right, and to ask your supporters or anyone to continue to give you funding to get that done in the best possible way. Okay, I wanted to stop and see if there are any questions that people might want to ask on that particular section of my discussion. Anything that... Yeah? I don't see any questions, but I have a question, and that is, is part of what we're seeing in terms of closing, especially small institutions, does that reflect the change from all volunteer staff to staff needing to be paid? I don't think so, but it might. Again, because nobody's really looked at how many museums are closing, where and why, I don't know that we're hearing about more smaller museums closing than larger museums, but I think that anyone who does need a data analysis will say we're probably hearing more about the larger museums because they get more publicity. So there may be a large number of small museums that are going out of business we're just not hearing about it. Yeah, okay. So maybe you should go on. I'll keep an eye on the questions, and I'll make sure they get answered at the end. Okay. For the next few slides, I'm talking about museums that are independent nonprofit corporations, and I'm going to get to some of those that aren't in a bit, but there are legal requirements that have to do with those museums that do not necessarily apply to museums that are not. So this first sentence is in bold for a reason. Making the decision and taking the appropriate steps to close a museum are the responsibility of the Board of Trustees, not the staff. And I don't know how many board members we may have on this call, but unfortunately the truth is that while the staff members can assist in many areas, all of the decisions are the responsibility of the Board. They can get guidance from their staff, but it's their job. Okay, so as we know, museums are public trusts. That means the Board is legally required to administer the trust, which is the museum, on behalf of the trust beneficiary, which is the public. When closing a museum, the Board works basically on behalf of the public to make the decision and take the required actions, and what they do is supposed to continue to benefit the public. While each state has its own set of procedures, there are federal laws that require that a tax-exempt charitable nonprofit organization distribute its remaining assets only to another tax-exempt organization. So there's state regulations, and then there are federal regulations, particularly if the museum has an IRS tax-exempt designation. So this comes from something in your handout, which is the National Council of Nonprofit Steps to Dissolve a Nonprofit Corporation. It's pretty straightforward. There's more detail in that handout. I'm not going to go through them, except to say that the plan of dissolution should originate, or usually does originate, in an organization's bylaws. In every set of bylaws, there is a dissolution clause. And that is the starting point for how a museum takes itself apart. This, it comes from the IRS. It's full of a lot of verbiage that you probably don't need in your organizational dissolution clause, but it does show you that for nonprofits with an IRS tax-exempt status, the assets have to be distributed for exempt purposes. State law may require that it goes to the federal, state, or local government for a public purpose, and assets not disposed of is for the court to determine. In some states, the dissolution plan needs to be approved by the court before anything further takes place. So each state has different requirements, depending on how the museum is organized, whether it is a trust, what type of trust, whether it is a nonprofit corporation. The starting place is always by contacting the office of the state that oversees your type of organization. In some states it's the Secretary of State, in some states it's the State Attorney General. I believe in some states that's called the States Attorney, but that's where you find out specifically how to do that. In some states, you will need court approval for your plan, and in all cases, since this is a legal activity, you will need legal counsel, and that's another place where there's a cost to close the museum. Here are two examples, one from Arizona, which is pretty straightforward, that basically says you submit a form, your article for dissolution, you pay a fee, you publish, and then you're pretty much done, in terms of what you legally are required to do for the state. In some cases, museums have just ceased to send in their annual corporation registration, and the state of Arizona says that's not the way you really need to physically make that statement and declare the dissolution, but they will occasionally just drop an organization or a corporation if the annual registration has not been sent in. And as a kind of side note, the Museum Association of Arizona just went through checking on the status of all the museums that we knew about in the state, and there certainly were instances where it wasn't clear that the museum had closed, but they had not sent in their annual registration as a corporation for a number of years, and those are some of the museums that are closing and falling under the radar that we don't know anything about. New York State, as those who follow state interest in museums, is not surprisingly has the most stringent of procedures for closing a museum, and that does include having the dissolution plan authorized by a justice of the Supreme Court in the judicial districts in which the nonprofit's office is located. So that is quite a bit more complicated, and again, it depends on the state. To just back up for where do you find the information about your state statutes, on your handout, there is a reference to NOLO.com, which provides the requirements for dissolving a nonprofit corporation in every state, so you can look that up. Okay, here are a couple of instances or situations that do not fall under the fairly straightforward state requirements on what you do to dissolve a nonprofit corporation. Museums with parent entities, like, let me just, I think I have it in the next slide, yes. Museums with parent entities are ones that are a part of larger organizations like universities or local governments, and those have different requirements. Usually they are not separate corporations, so the assets are absorbed by the parent organization, a museum that is part of a university. Usually, unless there has been some special contract or statement, fully belong to that university and is governed by the board of trustees of that university. If there is a friend or other support group that has been formed to assist in fundraising or other activities for the museum, which does happen quite often, and it is a separate nonprofit corporation, then that organization has the option of continuing to operate or closing. There are a number of instances, for example, when a history museum closes and the supporting historical society chooses to continue activities without a building and sometimes even without a collection, they may do programming, they may run programs. For example, here in Arizona, when the Phoenix Museum of History closed, the Phoenix Historical Society has continued in operation with a program for the pioneer families. So, they do not necessarily go hand in hand. The primary issue and concern when a museum that belongs to a larger entity closes is what happens to the collections, and that is an area that has been discussed for several museums. The one that hit the news most prominently in the last few years is the Rose Museum at Brandeis University. Brandeis was going to basically sell the collection, close the museum, and use the proceeds to support the university. There were, as many may remember, a big outcry and also the threat of a number of lawsuits which were sufficient in making the university change its mind about closing the museum. Unfortunately, this was not the case with the natural history collections of the University of Louisiana at Monroe. That, in that case, the university decided it needed the space that the collections were in and gave the museum a very short period of time to move them and dispose of them. According to some members of staff, they felt, if it wasn't actually said, that the university threatened to basically throw the collection in the dumpster if they didn't get it out of the building. The university backed off a little and claimed that they really weren't going to do that, but the dispersal of that collection was done in the space of six weeks and managed to get all of those collections to different institutions in a very short period of time, during which I'm sure better decisions could have been made if there was more time. I'm not going to go into the legal differences between what is a private collection and what is a museum and whether or not private collections can claim nonprofit status that often depends on how many people, there are how close that is to the owner's home, what kind of other use the collections get, but I'm just going to point out that these museums are not corporations or trusts and they can be closed and the assets disposed of however the owner determines. And you will see a couple of headlines here about so-called museums going to auction. And they are just sold for the benefit of the owner of the collection. The main problem and the main challenge with these is that this causes confusion for the public when they see these so-called museum closing and selling their collection to the auction. They then wonder if that's what, and I'm sorry I have no other word but real museums do when they close and so creates a great lack of understanding and also some expectations that the museum's collection will be dispersed when the museum closes. Another situation that I just want to mention is when there is debt. When a museum corporation dissolves that has liabilities, at least some of the assets have to be sold to satisfied creditors. This usually involves the sale of collections and in some cases that is really the collection gets sold and the money goes to the creditors, the bank for example. Other times yields have been struck that can minimize the loss of collections. In the case of the Fresno Metropolitan Museum, they actually filed for bankruptcy as part of the dissolution plan and more than 3,000 pieces were sold to pay the debts and most of that went to private collections although some of it did actually end up in other museums. Some of us will remember when Detroit was bankrupt and there was quite a bit of discussion of what would happen to the Detroit Institute of Arts which was fully owned by the city and whether that collection could be sold and there was quite a bit of discussion and negotiation to ensure that that collection stayed intact. Okay, collections issues. So we're now moving into an area of both known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Many of the collections related concerns as I said are similar to the ethical issues that are part of the deaccessioning process and as with that the transfer to a other nonprofit is always preferable. As with disposing of objects following deaccessioning the museum needs to be able to document good title to the collection before the object can be transferred to another organization or sold. So this means going back into the records to ensure that you really know that you own those pieces. Donor restrictions on each group of objects or objects need to be identified and in cases where those restrictions cannot be followed it may be necessary to go to court to get approval for actually disposing of the objects. In recent years we've seen a lot of cases come up mostly through deaccessions that have discussed an unwritten donor intent and there have been a number of cases where heirs or even donors themselves have gone to court to say I may not have put it in writing but that's not what I meant. And some of the reasons that nonprofits that museums have used to defend themselves in those cases would also apply to closing museums and these things include changed financial needs of the institution that is they need to get rid of everything and that the purpose of the gift no longer exists and obviously if you close the museum any conditions you've put on it or implied on an object being exhibited or used in a specific way or not used in a specific way ceases to exist with the museum. In many cases when donors or their descendants here in museum is closing they may request for family items to be returned. This is particularly a problem or a concern with museums that have very close community relationships. When the Chanute Air Museum closed there were a number of people whose families had either given objects or who had served at the air base that the museum was built on and wanted to have those things back as mementos of their family activities. But as with accession objects this desire to placate the donor or their heirs may be strong but the legal and ethical arguments for not returning to donors still apply. Excuse me. Loans will all need to be returned and if there are any problems concerning undocumented collections or old loans they need to be resolved using the appropriate state laws. Many of us who work with collections know we have undocumented collections and know we have old loans where we have lost track of the owner or the owner has died and are happily putting that off to another day when a museum closes that day has arrived and all of those issues need to be sorted out. One thing among the special circumstances worth noting are loans from the US government. A central requirement of loans from government museums is that the government can incur no cost at all for the loan including maintenance of the items which are sometimes very large or transport. This is something that the Chinute Air Museum had to deal with because among its collection were 40 quote military surplus planes on loan from various government museums. The cost to return these loans was really prohibitive. It was not at all possible to do it. And so the director knowing that that was going to be a big issue actually started with that as soon as he found out that the museum was going to close and he was able to relocate a number of the planes to other museums. But unfortunately the ones that he was not able to relocate and that the Air Force was not interested in because they had lots of them ended up being stripped for parts or scrapped on site. And that's the Air Force policy in regard to surplus military equipment. As the director said to me when we talked the fact that one of these planes was in a very prominent position outside the museum and that the whole community was actually going to have the unpleasant opportunity to watch one of their historic pieces symbolic of the history of their community basically scrapped on site was just really disturbing. As with the accessioning, the primary goal of this position of collections is to keep the objects accessible to the public. The ideal is to reclose the museum's collections to be transferred in total to another museum. But of course this isn't always possible. One case where this did happen was with the transfer of the Beed Museum's entire collection and library to the Mingay International Museum. In the words of the Beed Museum's director our missions are symbiotic and we are now confident that the Beed Museum collection will live on. But even when a museum has a logical successor as the Higgins Armory Museum did with the Worcester Art Museum part of the collection there was actually sold to create a $7.5 million dollar dowry to aid with the conservation and exhibit costs of the part of the collection that the Worcester Art Museum kept. It should be noted also that what happens to the proceeds if the collection is sold depends on the closing museum's bylaws that is who it goes to. Sometimes the museum dissolution clause will actually specify what museum the collection will go to or what the proceeds from the sale will go to or the type of organization. It will go to a museum that collects the same things a museum that serves the same community. But it also depends on state and federal law and there may be need for a specific court ruling if the dissolution plan does not cover that kind of thing. And finally we have a totally unanswered question of what happens to collections items that presumably through lack of interest or value are not transferred to another museum and are not sold. This is similar to the deaccessioned items that really nobody wants. And this is something we don't know very much about. We assume that people are putting them in the dumpster but we don't really know. While attention has been paid to what happens to the collection when a museum closes, we really don't know very much about the long term disposition of the objects. That is when the museum closes, there's an announcement of these items are going to this museum, these items are being sold and the proceeds are going to this cause. But we don't know what happens after a museum accepts an entire collection. They may not necessarily plan to incorporate it all into their permanent collection. We also know the process of large collections can take years during which time the use and access may be restricted. This is certainly the case with the Phoenix Museum of History collection. It is being kept in climate controlled storage but the Arizona Science Center is still deciding how it wants to use it and therefore access is really limited. Another instance is the Bead Museum in Glendale. When they closed, they transferred a specific set of archives from the founder of the Center for Bead Research. Those were transferred to the American Museum of Natural History. But if you go to beadsite.com which is where many bead collectors get their information, it still says about six years after the transfer that these items are being documented, archived, stored and will eventually be made available to the public. Subsequent disposal of these objects by the receiving museum is also a possibility. And one of the challenges there is that since many of these objects were never formally accessioned by those museums, they may not necessarily be subject to the museum's deaccession policies and procedures. Some museums use the deaccession policies and procedures for everything, whether it's accessioned or not, but there is also the option which is still as far as discussion goes within ethical museum standards that if something hasn't been deaccessioned that it doesn't need to go through the formal deaccession policy. I have also heard it suggested that because these were not collection items, that the proceeds from the sale of these items may not be subject to any of the restrictions placed on museums by AAM or the AAMD ethical statements. So long-term objects that were in the public trust and have transferred to another museum may end up being sold for purposes not related to collections care. When we move to staff concerns, we are fully in the area of unknown knowns. We do know that what happens in museums can deeply affect staff and volunteers personally. I have a colleague who I would say a good 15 years after a museum didn't close but lost a big chunk of funding, still talks about it with a lot of sorrow and a lot of pain in his voice. Elaine Gourian's groundbreaking book published in 1995, Institutional Trauma, Major Change in Museums and its effect on staff was maybe the first to document this in a number of different situations ranging from museum mergers to financial crises to the unexpected loss of the chief executive. And more recently, we've become increasingly concerned with issues relating to working in museum personnel issues including pay inequity, discrimination and even outright harassment. But unfortunately, we have barely begun to look at the effect of a museum closing on staff and volunteers. I will say that what comes to mind every time this is brought up is the conversation I had with the director of the Chinook Air Museum as we talked about the closing of that museum. And what he said, I would say maybe a dozen times in the course of the conversation, it was heartbreaking and it was horrible. So what should museums do? Let's bear in mind that again, going back to the legal part of this, closing the decision to close the museum and the process is a board responsibility and board driven. The museum's professional staff is critical in providing assistance in all aspects in closing the museum and assisting the board. But the board has to let them. Keeping the staff informed is important to do not only from this practical perspective, but it's also basic decency. And I have a sort of unpleasant anecdote from the Phoenix Museum of History. When that museum closed, the building and collections were transferred to the adjacent Arizona Science Center. It obviously was not made clear and I'm not sure by whom it wasn't made clear what was going to happen because the staff, volunteers and many of the members were led to believe that basically a downsized history museum would soon reopen under the new ownership. They left behind, and I was the person who got the Phoebe's, personal belongings like reading glasses and sweaters, as well as really heartbreaking notes that said, when we get back, we'll work on this. While some of the history exhibits were installed in the main science center building, the history museum building itself, the exhibit space that all these people thought they were going to come back and work in in a matter of months was actually gutted and turned into a create maker space. So a few things beyond keeping your staff informed. When a museum closes, the staff may want to be as helpful as possible, but they are also likely to be very concerned with finding new jobs. On occasion, specialized staff may be hired by the new museum as happened with the archivist at the Beed Museum who actually went with the collection to San Diego to continue to work on cataloging the collection at its new home. But that isn't something that happens very often. And any assistance that can be offered to departing staff, either by the administrative staff or by the board really should be. And one of the things that if you are in an administrative position in a museum that closes, you need to be cognizant of is that the records will probably disappear into the dumpster and that you will really need to make copies of anything relating to someone who may want to come to you for future recommendation. And finally, some museums choose to hold a formal activity for staff that allows them to be acknowledged and for their work to be celebrated. Alternatively, the museum and their supporters may choose to mourn the loss of the museum. And this was part of an interview on National Public Radio. The images were taken by a photojournalism student who was at the museum for the last day of the Corcoran Gallery of Origin 2014. And it does, in fact, provide a range of the public responses that we see from staff as well as other members of the community. What happens to all these people who are part of a museum's community is totally unknown and undiscussed. Obviously, they lose the museum building, the physical and intellectual content, the programming, the educational activities, whatever else they have used the museum for for its main purpose. But it also loses all the intangible things that we know that a museum provides. Maybe a place to discuss difficult issues, child center, performance center. And as my friend and colleague, Jody Crago of the Chandler Museum says, the community voice is also lost. Since I don't know of any studies of what happens to a community when a museum closes, I'm just gonna go through a few examples of how museums interacted with their public when they closed and how the public responded. So the Beat Museum in Glendale started fairly early keeping both their supporters and the public aware of their financial problems, as well as when they made the ultimate decision to close. The ability to keep the collection and the archives intact was actually very well received and it may be because this was a kind of specialized collection or because there really was a concerted effort to start early and figure out what to do. The Phoenix New Times wrote, the Beat Museum will become a part of San Diego's Ming Day International Museum, which will be an even more important cultural destination if that's possible now that it's the new home of Gornvale's collection. The Ming Day Museum itself also gave prominent coverage to the new collection in its own newsletter and sent postings to various bead collector and researcher site. They posted on bead L that the archive was going to the National, the New York Museum of Natural History and one collector wrote back, this is wonderful news. And finally, after the museum closed, it posted on a local website. The bead museum is now closed. The collection is being donated to the Ming Day International Museum in San Diego. The Peter Francis Archives are being donated to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Please show your support of our museum and visit these collections in California and New York. A somewhat opposite approach was taken by the Phoenix Museum of History where very little information was shared when the museum closed. And unfortunately that has led to continuing negative feelings from those who were involved and general confusion about what has happened to collections, to the collections. When the museum closed, the Downtown Voices Coalition, a group formed by sustainable Phoenix wrote, the Bond Finance Building, the building itself had been paid for by a city bond, was gobbled up by the nearby Arizona Science Center. Most of the artifacts once on display are inaccessible to the public. You'll have to buy a ticket to the Science Center to see the history exhibits. Something will be on display where the rest of the artifacts end up at this point as anybody's guess. And as recently as January 2016, this was posted on the internet. The Science Center's actions appear to be nothing short of predatory. They kept a certain amount of historical exhibit space and operation, allowing them to take over the historical museum's facilities to expand their own mission. However, only a portion of the collection were retained with the remainder cast to the poor women's. Very little information is still, or there is very little information available still at this date about the history exhibits from the Phoenix Museum of History that are on display at this other museum. There's nothing on the Science Center's website, but there is a recent article that was published as part of a research paper by a local university student that actually provides photographs and a description of the historical displays. It's really, really hard to find. So there's not very much information put out about that at all. Finally, the American Textile History Museum has provided a wealth of information on its website about what happened leading to its closure, where the collections have gone, as well as information about the educational programs, archives, and library. This is a case study as opposed to an example of exactly what to do. They even have a Q&A page that addresses not only what happens at the museum, but a wide range of topics that include whether or not objects can be returned to donors, what's happening to the building, and even whether museum closures are unusual. The museum has said it plans to keep its website up for at least the next year, making the online collection available to researchers. The collection itself was distributed among a number of museums, and a local newspaper that wrote about this noted that, on its face, it looks like a wholesale looting of one of the largest textile museums in the world. The story behind it is a sad one, but for many, it has a happy ending. The American Textile History Museum is officially gone, it appears, but the story of America, as told through textiles, other museums are still telling that story. So what are our key takeaways? We go back to the Board of Trustees. Closing a museum involves legal procedures that are the responsibility of the board. The disposition of the collection has both legal and ethical consideration, and requires cooperation from not just the old and new museums, but their staffs as well. There's a lot we don't know. We don't know the impact of museum closings on staff, communities, donors, governments, anyone, but we do know that the more transparent a museum is about its problem and what it plans to do, the more likely it is to have continued public support, both for those people involved in closing the museum and for museums in general. And so that brings us to the end of what I have to talk about. The handout has a number of references in it, and if you want to get in touch with me directly and ask some questions, that's where you find me. Okay, I'm putting up the evaluation link. Please take a minute and fill it out. They're very important to us, and we'll go to the questions. I have one question too. I had understood from one of the Field Services Alliance meetings that there are some states who have some kind of arrangement that if a museum within the state, like a local historical society, goes out of business that the state will temporarily hold collections until a new place is found or whatever it is does reorganization. But I know when I began to look for that information, I couldn't find it. Do you know of anything like that? I have not heard about that. It may be a, whether it's a state government thing, it may be something that is included in some funding or enabling legislation for state historical societies. That if a, that the state historical society is given responsibility for caring for collections from museums that are closed. But I don't know of any specific examples. Okay, Todd Sniff actually, who obviously was involved in the Textile History Museum, said that they did continue to receive far small donations during their closure, but most of the funding was from reserves. He also said to you for mentioning them in a positive way. And Jennifer Ortiz just said, I manage our field services in Utah and we don't have anything on the books about stepping in for closed museums. Ronald Marvin said, we are considering closing one of our satellite sites, but maintaining our main site, how would the rules affect closing one building rather than the entire society? And someone else said we're considering that too. If you're not basically dissolving the corporation that runs it, there are no legal requirements about what you need to do. The Herd Museum here in Phoenix had two satellite museums that they ultimately closed because of financial reasons and really they just brought all the assets back to the main building. So I would think, and again, I don't think there would be any legal requirements about closing satellite buildings and just reabsorbing the assets. Okay, Jane Nicol said, we are a historical society which owns an archive and a separate museum. We may close a museum, but not be dissolving the society. The museum is not a separate 501c3. How does this change it? Again. It's a similar situation. Yeah, I think again, this is one of those things that you would check with legal counsel, but again, if you're not dissolving the corporation then in a sense you're relocating assets. The question, it becomes more of a deaccessioning question than a closing a museum question. That is, if you're closing the museum and will not need to get rid of collections, then you're basically deaccessioning those assets. And that then, your deaccessioning policies and procedures come into play and all the ethical considerations about what can be done with collections. Now, if you won't behave like that, now if you will not be having physical three-dimensional objects in the future, I think there would be no argument that you could certainly use any proceeds to care for and replenish the archival materials. Right. So Lynn Sharp said, but if a university is a state institution of higher education, this state may be the owner of collections. This is talking about closure of university museums. Right. Yeah. She says this can be hard to sort out. Right. It is usually when a university or other parent organization begins to make noises about deaccessioning and closing that those museums actually figure out whether or not they have a charter or any rights, basically other than to do what they're told. And those are the areas where there is a, basically the owner, and I have a work at a university museum and set this directly to the Board of Trustees, it's not really interested in running the museum. And it is difficult to bring any kind of pressure on that group to follow standard museum ethical or collections practices. So those situations usually end up requiring legal intervention of some sort. That the museum itself belongs to the state and the state has the authority to do whatever it wants. And it's only through negotiation and potentially financial or political pressure that sometimes you can get the state or the university to do the right thing by the collections and what the museum has provided. Yes, Cynthia Schlemmer just asked, will the slides be archived? Yes, the recording of the slides, the handout, and I will add a few things to the handout. We did a really good webinar on deaccessioning and I'll add that to the handout. They will all be posted in the next few days. So when you no longer see the ad for this webinar on our main page, you can go to the archives and it'll be there. Let's see, Stephanie Gardner says, I'm reading the new book, Is It Okay to Sell a Monet? Which argues that the Board of Trustees has a duty to their institution to make a fair market value gain when collections are sold. This is in contrast to the historian's desire that items stay in the public trust. Well, you address this line of thinking and Todd said, like the Berkshire Museum. Yeah, well, but I might argue that the Berkshire Museum is a slightly different situation, although I have not read everything on it. But to address Stephanie's question, the Board of Trustees' responsibility includes not diminishing the value of the trust. And when you give things away, you diminish the value of the trust, which is why the Board almost always the first thing they think to do with a deaccessioned item is to sell it because they will then at least recoup the value of that object. They may not have the object, but they will have the value of that object. And this is in absolute stark opposition to the feeling that most museums have that if something has been made accessible to the public, it should not be taken away from them. And I have to say that there are arguments on both sides so that in fact it is true that the Board of Trustees' fiduciary responsibility is to make sure that things are not given away for no return. So that yes, that's their responsibility to get money when collections are sold. Yeah, so Todd Smith said the dumpster was not used in the case of the Tuxail History Museum, but he says unless there are other restrictions on a transfer, the transfer can go anywhere, right? Yep. Yeah, Amy Menchner says my parent organization wants to do a long-term loan of some collections to another non-profit, not a museum, to be on display there. And I'm skeptical that this is a good solution, but the Board of our parent organization is excited about the prospect. Are they gonna get, is your parent organization gonna get money? Amy? I don't know if she's still here. No, she's still here. Actually, this is something. I know they're not gonna get money. Yeah. This does happen. And I'm trying to think of, excuse me, examples. In most cases where an organization, where a museum does long-term loans, the organization stays in business. So it sounds like the parent organization is not gonna dissolve, but its solution for what to do with the collections is to basically hold on to the collection, not dissolve it or not dissolve all of it and lend it to another organization. The challenge there is, as we know as museum professionals, that those things need to be monitored by somebody and usually boards don't have the capacity to do that kind of work, to ensure that the objects are whatever it is that you wanna have happen or not have happened to objects on loan. So to me, that would be the first question I would ask. It's not necessarily a bad thing for those items to be placed somewhere else, but it has a number of circumstances that need to be ironed out in a written contract. Yeah, Amy says he's right. Ronald Marvin says, before I arrived at prior board, placed our natural history specimens on permanent loan to a local nature center. And most of our mounted animal specimens are on display there. I guess that was to go along with Amy's comments. Right. It would seem to me as long as somebody's looking after them. Well, the first thing that comes to mind is that the mantra, there is no such thing as a permanent loan. And I think that sort of one way to approach this is to help the board understand that it's in everybody's interest to have a written agreement that has some kind of period renewal. I mean, you don't necessarily have to renew it every year, although that's a good idea. But to take a look at the conditions on that loan, review them and say, because we wanna make sure that everything is happening to the benefit of not only the people who can see this at the nature center, but to the people who may wanna see these at our museum and have the objects preserved, we should review the entire loan and make it on a renewable basis, maybe five years. And I would say that if you are having problems getting your board to take action, you might just drop the piece of information that a lot of animal mounts were preserved with arsenic as you see the building to check. Yeah. So Bennett Lloyd in Florida said, re-asset, in relation to asset relocation, I noticed the trend in areas of urban sprawl where smaller historical societies and museums are swallowed up and buried by expanding cities. We are experimenting with transferring and consolidating collections into larger and better resource county entities, but keeping the corporate historical societies intact. This is in Florida. On that note, what are the continuing responsibilities for board members for retaining legal paperwork when their physical location no longer exists? And Ronald Marvin asked the question along that same line, what do you do with all the legal paperwork once a museum is closed? Okay. There are, to address Bennett's question first, there are a lot of corporations that do not have a physical space separate from the officers of the corporation, and it is the responsibility of the officers of the corporation, not as the board officers, to maintain those records. So this is, I mean, the idea of consolidating museums and collections is one that is a really great one that is beginning to be discussed and tried out, particularly among history museums. But it's the historical society, the corporation remains intact, then the officers of that historical society's board are responsible for maintaining the records. Now they may sit in somebody's office and be passed on from one secretary to another, but they're the ones who deal with that, whether or not there's a physical location. Now once a museum has closed, the best thing that can happen is to find some kind of archives that will take the records. This is one of the pieces, and I did not address that of what happens to all the information once the organization closes and dissolves. Ideally, the collections records go with the collection, or at least a copy of them does, but that the sum level of information about what the organization was and what it did goes to somebody else's museum for our time, basically. Tatsunas says that at ATHM, we arrange for the museum records and files to become part of the historical archive of a local university. That makes sense, do you? Yeah. Does that, the state archives? Sadly, in going through the archival material at the Phoenix Museum of History, there are a number of organizations whose archives are stored there, and some decision is going to have to be made about what happens to them, eventually whether they go back to the organization for them to find another home or whether they get transferred somewhere else overall. Yeah, so we have a few more minutes left. I see there are a few people that are still typing. Please remember to do the evaluation, and in the next few days, the webinar will be posted with everything as I said, and you just look in the 2018 archives on our website, and I'll just remind you once again there are two more webinars for this year. One is on care of plastics, and one is on packing and crating materials. Um, yeah. Oh, and Todd Smith said also the Massachusetts attorney general got their files too. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, and there may be legal requirements in terms of what happens if there is courts involved. Yeah, and if you have a nonprofit, most states have a place where when you're filing your final paperwork, you have to file where those records go. So, yeah, you need to look in your state to see what they require. But I think that's it. Thank you all so much for coming. Thank you so much, Janice, for doing this. This is a topic, as you know, that I've been interested in in a long time because I see a lot of tiny museums going out of business with no plan. And so I'm really pleased that we could do this. I hope it's been helpful. And we'll see you at the end of the month. Thanks. Thanks, everybody.