 Hello, everyone, and welcome to another C2C Care live panel. My name is Robin Bauer-Kilgo and I am the C2C Care community coordinator. Just before we start real quick, I would like to acknowledge that this talk is being moderated on the traditional lands of the Mikasuki and Seminole people and their ancestors and pay my respect to the elders both past and present. Also a quick tech reminder, there's a slight delay from when we actually start streaming this call to when it's pushed out to Facebook. So as we communicate and we talk in the comments section, just know that there's a little bit of a delay right there. And then I'm going to go ahead and ask our presenters to start introducing themselves. So first I'm going to go ahead and hand the mic off to Greg Badney. Thank you very much and thanks for having myself and the Rar West Art Museum be a part of this. My name is Greg Badney and I'm the executive director of the Rar West Art Museum. It is a municipal art museum in northeastern Wisconsin. Just about 30 miles south of Green Bay, right on Lake Michigan. I'm looking out at a lighthouse out my window right now. As I said, we're a municipal museum, so we're part of the city of Manitowoc, Wisconsin. And we house a large collection of some of Wisconsin's best artwork from recognized names like George O'Keefe, Andy Warhol, Picasso. We also have a historic home, the Vilas Rar Mansion. And we're also very interestingly also the site of a crash landing in 1962 of the Sputnik 4 Soviet spacecraft. So a lot going on here, a lot to share with the public. Excellent. Thank you. And Marietta, could you please introduce yourself? Hi. Thanks for having me. I'm Marietta Carr. I'm the librarian and archivist at the Schenectady County Historical Society in Schenectady, New York. We're about 30 minutes from Albany, New York. We are an independent nonprofit that focuses on the history of Schenectady County and sharing the stories of the people and events that happened in our area over time. We are sort of a three-pronged operation. We have the museum and library where I'm seated right now. And then we have the Maybe Farm, which is the oldest farm or homestead in the Schenectady County. It was established in the 1670s. And then we have Browar House Creative, which is an art and culture center in the city of Schenectady, and it is part of the oldest house in the city of Schenectady. So we are bringing the historic aspect into the modern era and connecting our culture from the 1730s when the house was built to the current use as an art and creative space. Excellent. Thank you. Mickey, could you introduce yourself, please? My name is Mickey Ryan. I'm the chief registrar at the Des Moines Art Center in Des Moines, Iowa. We are primarily a modern and contemporary art museum, and we reopened to the public almost a month ago. Great. Thank you. Ann, go ahead and introduce yourself. Hello. Thanks for having me. I'm Ann Richards, and I am the security and risk program manager at the Minnesota Historical Society. At the Minnesota Historical Society, we have over about 26 historical sites that are open to the public, and we're kind of housed out of St. Paul, where our largest kind of collections-based and museum and library are there in St. Paul. So we've got a wide range of kind of education, preservation, and historic sites across the state. Great. Thanks, Ann. Ben, go ahead. Yeah, thanks. I'm also from the Minnesota Historical Society. Ben Leonard. I am the director of Greater Minnesota Sites. And just to put a little context in those 26 sites that are publicly accessible across the state, we have a lighthouse that Ann is modeling there. We have an 1870s town, and we have a tiny historical home that I can't even stand up in half of the upstairs. So it's a real wide mix of different types of sites. Some are large, some are small. A lot of them are mid-range. So we kind of have the full gamut. Excellent. Thanks. Well, the title of this talk today is Reopening Cultural Institutions, the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. So what we tried to do today is we tried to gather people from across the country as much as we could to kind of share stories, swap ideas, and talk about kind of what cultural institutions have been dealing with for the past couple of months. I'm located in Florida, so we've had an interesting roller coaster when it comes to reopening plans for many institutions for the past few months. Ben and Ann, can you tell us a little bit about what's been going on in Minnesota when it comes to the reopening of institutions? Yeah. For a little bit of context, Ann probably has more information on this, but we're currently, I think, about 30th among states in COVID case rate per 100,000 residents. So just as some context to people across the country, we closed to the public in March. All of our sites, we laid off about 40% of our staff or about 230 people. March through July 1st really took that time to plan and decide, okay, of our 26 sites, what are sites that we think we can open based on enhanced cleaning, based on social distancing and all of that. If we thought that we could open a site, we continued furloughs for those staff for the majority of our sites. We actually said, you know what? We're not even going to attempt to open these until spring of 2021. So we could talk about the ones that we are opening and have opened today, but I wanted to give that context and Ann, I'm sure you have a lot more. Yeah, so while the timeline, like Ben said, starting March 14th, we really started to, we shut down all the sites and we went to teleworking primarily. And that was just because of what the peer institutions were doing in the area and then also seeing a lot of cancellations happening in our events and programs. And so we kind of stuck with that wave. And then March 28th, Governor Walts did the stay-home order for Minnesota. So through March 28th until I think the beginning of, I want to say May 1st was when that stay-home order stopped. And then he really started reopening things very, very minimally. And the main executive order that affected us came out with an effect on June 5th. So we were taking that time about three months there. All of our staff teleworking, that could telework. Like Ben said, a lot of our public-facing staff got furloughed. And then the ones that were not opening until our next season in the spring were laid off. So our sites are kind of different phases depending on kind of where they fall and what the programs are. That makes sense. Marietta, what's going on up in your New York, correct? So I mean, you guys were a little bit of an epicenter at the beginning of this whole process. So kind of how is it looking right now? What was your timeline like? So, yes. So New York was hit hard, especially like right away. And the Albany and Capital District area, so Schenectady is right next to Albany. And we're in the Capital District. We weren't as impacted as New York City and some of the other areas downstate. But we did have a fair number of cases. And everyone was very just a super high alert that this was happening and that this was going to impact us. In particular, our nursing staff from local hospitals traveled downstate to support the hospitals there. So that was something, again, that everyone's sort of like high alert sort of attitude of like, oh gosh, what's going to happen next? That sort of feeling was going through the whole community. So we closed, or well, we didn't officially close until March 16th, but we sort of scaled back all of our operations starting at the very beginning of March. And so things like all of our school programs that we do with the local elementary schools, we had to cancel all of those. We canceled bus trips to New York City. We canceled a lot of our speakers and other programs that we had before we actually closed for good for the stay home order. So it felt like a contracting, you know, we were full on. And then every day we kept contracting and contracting and contracting until we finally closed. And there was a lot of uncertainty and a lot of just, you know, what's going to happen next? What do we do now? What is everyone else doing and not really knowing what to do? So on March 16th, we went into stay at home. We're a pretty small institution. There's only six of us on staff at all. But then we have a pretty strong volunteer core. And the biggest issue that we had was communicating with the volunteers, and especially because most of them are retired, the most of them are older, trying to guide them through what we were still figuring out ourselves as to like what to do now. And so that was a kind of a shock to the system for a lot of our volunteers was not being able to come in and do their volunteer work for several months. So, yes, New York went in to stay at home. Our pause, New York pause order on March 16th. And then over the last two months, we've been doing a phased reopening where the governor has had four phases. In each phase, he released the government, the governor's office released guidelines as to who could reopen and what kinds of businesses could reopen. We weren't able to reopen until phase four, which started on July 1st. And then we actually held off a couple more days because of just giving ourselves a little bit more time to figure out exactly what reopening looked like because with each phase, new guidelines came out. And those only came out a week before the phase actually started. So we had about a week to read all of the guidelines and figure it out and see how that applied to us, especially given our nature, the variety of things that we do and the variety of spaces that we have. And a lot of the guidelines were kind of tricky to try and really nail down how it would impact us. So we gave ourselves a couple of extra days and we didn't actually reopen until July 6th. So we've been open since then. Yeah, that's pretty good. I mean, generally speaking, it sounds like you guys thought that out quite well. Mickey, what about you guys in Iowa? Well, Iowa was one of the few states that never had a mandatory stay at home order. But we shut down on, I believe, we were set home on March 16th. I don't know, I can't remember when the official closures were, but sometime around that time. And then at the end of May, the governor started reopening museums and some restaurants and stuff, things like that. Our staff started coming back and we did a... Our staff started coming back to... Well, we always had some staff on site like maintenance and security, but we started everybody else on June 1th. We had a deep clean for a week and some of our art handling staff came in to start kind of moving around some crates and just kind of dust things off and just take care of some of our galleries. And then my team, we actually came in the next week. So June 8th, we had a de-install exhibitions and change. We had a traveling show that had been, you know, if we had to get off and send back overseas before we could open to the public. So we had to do that on it. And we actually are working on a rotating work schedule. So we have two teams. And so that provided some challenges. And some of that was some of the things that we changed early on that it just didn't work for our art handling crew because we just, A, don't have it. We have a small staff. We only have four full-time art handlers. And so we couldn't have two. It just wasn't possible to work with contemporary art. And so that kind of changed early on. But we're still doing it with our registration team. There's three of us with that. And then the rest of staff, although people who could work for home was still encouraged to work from home. They came in the following week. And then three weeks later, we opened to the public. And during that time, they had to come up with the tech. We don't, we never had sold tickets before. When we don't sell tickets, it's still free. But we didn't have a ticketing system. So they had to set up a ticketing system, time to entry system, all the signage, and the way, the flow of the museum and how it was going to work. So that's what they did for the three weeks before the opening on July 7th. So that's where we stand. Super interesting. Greg, what about you guys? How did it look like for you? Pretty similar to what Mickey described. Wisconsin did have a stay-at-home order. We closed the doors on the 16th of March. And we stayed closed. Now, Wisconsin definitely, it has been, well, probably nationwide, worldwide. It's been a political issue, closures. And here it has been political in that there's been a lot of legislation, counter-legislation, and lawsuits. And so there was a lawsuit that our Supreme Court upheld that ended our stay-at-home order in early May. As I had said, we are a municipal museum. We're small. We only have three full-time staff and nine part-time. And the nine part-time staff, we furloughed during the two months that we were closed. The full-time staff, we're doing a combination of work from home and also, again, because we are part of this large umbrella organization, we were committed to working in other departments of the city of Manuswak. To give you an idea, I worked as a polling chief during our primary elections in early April because all of the volunteers had quit. So we were using staff members to do that. The city essentially told our museum that we would be opening on June the 1st. So we got staff back about two weeks prior. And again, by staff, I mean the three of us who are full-time, we did have an incoming traveling exhibit that we were able to put together. I shouldn't say traveling exhibit, it was small, it was two traveling pieces. But they were large conceptual art pieces that had to be put together. And then we opened with what we call the art path. We have a relatively large building for, again, the size of our staff and the size of our community. About 16,000 square feet of art space, including the historic home. And we developed a single-circuit pathway that allows for people to come in and they can enter the museum, take in all the exhibits in the museum and our historic home, and leave double-backing, never crossing paths with other patrons. So that encourages distancing and never touching anything. So all the services that would be touched doors are automatic. We're allowing for the six feet of space throughout. So we've taken those steps to ensure. Now one thing we aren't doing, and I know we'll get into a little bit of conversation, is we're not gathering information from visitors. Mickey had said they set up a ticketing so that they would be able to control access. Because our building is large and our attendance is not that large, we haven't had an issue with controlling the amount of people in the museum. We thought we might, and we did have steps taken for that, but they weren't with time ticket. And so that's one of the things that looking forward we're still trying to figure out. Now I had said statewide that things are very political. We just on August 1st, had instituted a mask mandate for indoor spaces. Between June 1st, when we opened and August 1st, we had a loose requirement. The city of Manitowoc without an ordinance could not tell people that they couldn't come into a public building without a mask. So we were telling people that we were mandating the mask, but we had no ability to police that, which was tricky, but now we do have a statewide mask mandate that said, my understanding is that there will be a legal challenge to that upcoming. So, whether that continues to have teeth, we don't know. And that pretty much takes us to where we are now. Yeah, it feels like from the beginning, this was like all the information we got, it was like a constant learning, reassessing, learning, reassessing, redoing, learning, it was just constant. And I feel like it's gonna be like that for the next bit of time when it comes to that. I wanna step back a little bit though and ask you guys about your reopening plans. Obviously, this is connecting to collections care. We talk a lot about the collections within the institutions. When it came to your reopening plans, how much did the collection staff in particular have a seat at the table when it came to talking about it? Obviously, I do a lot of emergency training as well, and I always like to tell people, obviously we care about people. We always, we wanna make sure people are good, but those of us who are collections people, that's like our second priority is like, okay, what's going on with the collections, what's happening? So, Mickey, when you guys were kind of looking at things, did it look like the collection staff at your institution have a seat at the table when it came to the reopening plans or was it more dictated by other people? It was originally organized by our director of security and visitor services and our senior leadership team, our director and such. And, but then I was invited to take part. It went through our visitor services committee. And I don't think anybody realized how big it was gonna be and how much work it was going to be. So, it started as people just saying, well, let's just write down all of our ideas. And then it became a huge undertaking. And then there was a lot of people at the table. And so, I did, I asked a lot of questions. So, I got the information, but I wasn't there at the beginning of the planning, but definitely I was always part of the, I was part of subsequent conversation. So, what about for you up in New York? Marietta. So, there's only six of us to begin with. So, there's the director, the curator, me, the librarian. We have our facilities manager and office manager and an education manager. So, we were all together right at the whole, throughout this whole process, we've been checking in with each other and working with each other pretty diligently. So, there was never a time when we weren't part of the conversation. And in particular, we kind of rotated out as far as like who was checking on which buildings to make sure everything was fine because we couldn't actually work in any of the buildings like we normally do. We worked together to really communicate to make sure that all of our buildings and all of our collect, because our buildings are actually part of the collection because we have several historic buildings. So, making sure all of the collections, including the buildings were safe and sound throughout the several months when we couldn't work inside of any of them. The main question that we had was about cleaning of spaces because in particular, the library is the most heavily used place in terms of people coming and spending a lot of time. The museum and the maybe farm, people can circulate and get in and out pretty quickly. And the most of the maybe farm areas are actually outside. So, there's a lot of programming that we do outside and the visitor experience is predominantly outside and there's only a few things that are happening inside. So, we didn't have to worry so much about cleaning those areas as much as we have to worry about cleaning the library and making sure that the cleaning products are not impacting the archives. And we're being very diligent about that, but it took us a while to figure out exactly what that would look like and what that would mean. And we had to work, I had to work pretty carefully with our facilities manager. And so did our curator was working with the facility manager about the museum and again, the building, the interior parts of the maybe farm. But we've determined that really the higher priority was making sure the library was okay because we just get so much more use. No, that completely makes sense. Ann and Ben, what did it look like for your guys reopening plan? Like who was sitting? Cause you guys are obviously dealing with multiple sites. So, how did it look like when you guys were kind of approaching that situation? Yeah, we, so we're a little bit larger. We had before furloughs and all this, we had about 600 on staff and they're across 26 of our sites, 13 of those are owned and operated by our staff, other, our own and operate or operated, excuse me, by a local historical society or other kind of group that's managing that. So we have still the responsibility of that building as it is a part of our kind of assets. And then the, but the employee side was not. So we have a very odd kind of mixture. I would say unique, it's not odd. It's a unique mixture of kind of needs at each one of our properties. And we're part of our budget comes from the state of Minnesota. So we're very connected to the state, but also disconnected. So we're also a nonprofit and the state of Minnesota for several years, I think the last five years has been really pushing forward continuity of operations plans. And so I was able to kind of sit in those meetings and develop and start looking at business continuity for our institution. And that work really helped with responding to COVID. And so we've got kind of different phases of turning the dial and each one of our properties, which is kind of the continuity phase, which is that security facilities operation, the people who need to be on site. We had about, we had collections and last work collections, people that are on site, I think every day, checking the RH, checking for leaks, doing a walkthrough. Facilities managers are always on call. So for a few of those properties going forward, especially the history center where our main kind of collections and museum exhibit are, as it relates to kind of the reopening and returning to work. So we had two different teams. We had one that was really focused on the employees, kind of what that looked like. That was led by our deputy director of administration and kind of pulled together that continuity stuff. We created a return to work plan based on the governor Waltz's what they're calling COVID preparedness plan. So we kind of tailor that. And that's something that every business has to have in place right now to be open. So there was quite a lot of restrictions that if we had an employee, whether they were checking for leaks, whether they were doing ground maintenance at one of our sites across the state, we had to have something in place that kind of overarched and covered for their health and safety. And then there was the return to open team who really looked at, okay, what is it gonna look like to have our sites open? What are the guidance out? And they were working and Ben was on this team. There was overlap between those two teams. And there was a lot of kind of work and coverage, I think actually full coverage over every single department on either one of those teams. So they definitely worked in tandem and told with one another and made sure that everything was in line. So our employees were safe when they were opening to the public or if we were gonna open to the public then how do we make our employees safe? So it's definitely kind of a chicken and the egg thing happening for about a month there. But we got through it with just the, I think expertise of our group from the return to open to try in and think about how other areas in the United States were opening. So we were able to kind of apply that before any of the guidance came out for Minnesota. And then we were pretty much set and ready to go once that guidance came out for some of our sites that were primarily outdoor operations. And then for kind of including collection staff, we, before we even went to stay home order, we worked really hard on these kind of enhanced cleaning guidelines for all of our properties. So how are we keeping these properties safe and clean while we were still open and our collections liaison staff and library and archive staff were very involved in creating that, kind of talking about what cleaning and disinfectants could be used on historic surfaces in our housing and also what EPA kind of proposed guidance and things like that that we could use everywhere else. We had like very touch exhibits. We had to work with IT. What can we use to clean off the screens of the touch screens and things like that? So we created probably about a 10 page document and that remains in place today now that we're open to. So that was a lot of good kind of group work between facilities and then our collections room. It's interesting because a lot of the questions that are popping up in the chat right now are people saying like, what do you use? Chemicals wise, like everyone's like, what do you use? What do you do? That's true, right? Like when this first came out, like I remember all of us kind of being like, my worst fear and this, I don't think this happened. I hope this didn't happen. But my worst fear is that some very good, well-meaning person would be like, I bought all the Lysol wipes at the Costco. We can wipe down everything. And it would be like, yeah, you can use those in some spots, but not on those collections. Like, you know what I mean? So it is kind of interesting to hear everyone talk about kind of what the cleaning obviously is one of the most important things. But from a collection standpoint, we're all like, what is in the material that you guys are using for the cleaning? So we might round back to that in a little bit. But I did want to hear Greg, you talk a little bit about just your, what kind of staff, cause you guys aren't a big staff. So what did it look like when it came to it? No, kind of like Marietta. We've got a pretty small staff. However, again, and I'll probably mention this every time I'm talking, we're part of a larger city organization. So Anne had mentioned continuity among their sites. For us, it was continuity within the city. Our city operates not only the art museum, but a small city zoo, field houses that are run by our parks and rec department, an aquatic center, and a senior center. And I know that the city and by city, I mean our mayor and our city council and that they were adamant about us having for the public a clear understanding across buildings of what would be open and what would be allowed and what wouldn't be. So at the table were a lot of non museum people and certainly people that had their own concerns. Our senior center, for instance, which didn't open for a full month after we opened and is open in a very limited capacity. A lot different than our parks and recreation, which started open ball fields up pretty early. So I had to put on my collection management hat for a while being a director. I was lucky enough that I have background a little bit in that and I was able to do a lot of the collections management work during our two months that we were closed. Our assistant director is also in charge of collections management. We're also going through an upgrade to our hobos, our temperature and humidity loggers. So we were doing all of that half remotely, half on site with communication among a bunch of different people and our city IT people who have no knowledge of what needs to be done for those units. I hope they're not on this. They're gonna think that's critical, but I doubt that they are. Just trying to make sure that we had all of the parties necessary with specific concerns. For the overall reopening, I would say, unfortunately it was top down. It was a top down approach. I was involved in discussions. We wanted to make sure again, that there was that continuity. So for the collections, we were able to advocate for best practices. And again, being that we're part of an umbrella organization, we do have the ear of some of our electeds, including our mayor, who will take the proper steps that we tell them about because they're so kind of separated from the museum world. No, that's great. Kind of moving forward a little bit. I wanna talk a little bit about, just in your guys view, did the reopening, did it feel like it went pretty smoothly or did it feel like looking back at it, maybe we'll make some differences. I kinda hate to be some sort of weird vision, but I have a feeling like where some of us are gonna have to go through, closing down and reopening again. So I live in a state that's probably gonna experience that. So can you guys think of any issues, maybe or did you have any issues that happened that you feel comfortable talking about? Mickey, you're nodding. Well, from a collection point of view, our reopening went really, really well. I mean, we had a lot of policies in place and our staff felt very comfortable. Where I know that there were some issues and I just talked to our director of security today and I kinda asked him what he thought where there were problems. It was with the ticketing. It was new technology. It was, we allowed a certain amount of walk-ups that hadn't reserved their tickets and that causes problems. And so that is where, I think the technology realm is where they're, but when you're doing the best you can and you're learning as you go, but it was seemingly, seemingly smooth. And the organization of the security team, I know that we had to kind of rearrange. They have our security staff working in like working groups, pods, because we have to have breaks in different, we can't have everybody in the break room. We have one break room, I mean. So we have people in our conference room that we're not using right now because we're not allowed to have face-to-face meetings. We have people in an office that's empty. We have people in studios, we're also a studio. We have art classes, so we have studios that are being utilized for breaks. And I know that they had to kind of rearrange that as it went, but I think it didn't take much time. I mean, they've been working it out well and communicating really well, so. Ben, how was it for you guys? Were there any kind of the issues pop up while you guys were gonna look at reopening or did it seem to go pretty smoothly from where you sat? You know, John had done some advice that I would give to folks. And I think, you know, be cautious. If your plan involves everything going right, it's not gonna work out. Like, build failure into that. That's how I live life, like, go ahead. You know, care for your staff. We've all talked about furloughed staff. I think it's sometimes we forget those of us who aren't furloughed that somebody else who is has had a completely different experience. And coming back to work is exciting to see them, but like, might be traumatic for them. And, you know, they have to get through that feeling of being furloughed and then the feeling of coming back to a job that's normally hard enough. And now you throw in, I could get sick or I could get my family sick. There's just a lot of self-care that I think we need to build into our plans. If your buildings and spaces allow for it, you know, separate staff and visitors as much as possible. We stopped doing tours. We started doing one way. We reserved certain restrooms for staff and certain restrooms for the public. I really recommend those kind of things. In, honestly, our two main sites that are open now with Split Rock Lighthouse, which you can see in Ann's background, and Jeffers Petroglyphs, our indoor operations at those sites, our indoor visitor centers are largely closed to the public. You can come in and do a financial transaction. You can't shop retail in our visitor center. There is a pop-up shop outside at Split Rock because that is a large moneymaker at that site. At Jeffers Petroglyphs, the visitor center is closed except for the restrooms and the financial transaction. So we're able to limit the need for enhanced cleaning because those spots aren't open to the public. It also gives staff a refuge where they know that they're not going to encounter the public. And I think that's important. Focusing on customer service. We have seen overwhelmingly that people are excited we're open. Even before we had a mask mandate, people would see our staff wearing masks and they would go back and get theirs or they would put theirs on. We have had a few negative incidents, but the majority of folks in Split Rock is a site that this time of year, I mean, we're getting anywhere from 600 to 1,300 people a day. And literally, we've been open since July 15th. There's been three people that I've heard about that like haven't been the easiest to work with in terms of visitors. So it's really a small percentage of people. We've invested extra staff in the upfront wayfinding portion. So if you went to Split Rock last year, you would have come and walked right in the building and not seen a single staff person until you walked up to the register. Now you encounter two different sets of staff explaining the experience, explaining what parts of the experience aren't open, explaining how to enter the experience. If you purchase tickets online, you go through one line. If you have to buy tickets on site, you go through another. And so visitors want to do the right thing but just spending that extra time has made it so much easier for the staff inside the experience because everybody knows the rules, everybody knows the score. There's a lot more signage, right? And we color coded our signage differently. So we have COVID signs that are one color, wayfinding directional signage is another color and interpretive signage that's another color. There's a lot of signage and it gets overwhelming but I think that color coding does help kind of cut through the noise for people. So those are really my top recommendations for folks that are thinking about reopening. That color coding is a really good idea. I like that because it really gives people an idea of like, hey, this is why this is here. And actually someone has posted in the chat that they're kind of saying I'm interested in how visitors react to change in available access and restrictions. We have very mixed reactions from the public. Some appreciate the new protocols and understand others come in all caps and glued. So, and again, coming from the state of Florida, I'm sure we house most of the include people who come forward that come to these things. Does anyone else have anything? Oh, go ahead. Well, if I had to say one thing that I will shut up for the rest of the time, I promise. But I think having a history museum, honestly, I think one of the things we struggle with is we want to give our visitors more information than they really want. We don't do a good job meeting them where they're at. And I think one thing that we have found because we stopped doing tours and we're doing a one-way self-guided experience is that a large portion of the public actually prefers that. They don't necessarily want to talk to us for 20 minutes or 50 minutes. They want to explore on their own. They want to have that experience. If they have questions, they want to ask the staff that are clearly visible and ready to answer questions. So I think we've found some things that honestly, it's early, hopefully COVID goes away at some point. I think we're gonna keep elements of this programming because there's a portion of people that like that. And for the people that want tours, we can offer those at certain times throughout the day. So for us, it's been eye-opening in a good way, I think. Does anyone else have any reaction to kind of are your visitors? Sure, go ahead, Mariana. So it's really interesting that you're finding people don't want to do tours and they prefer the self-guided because we're finding the opposite. The Tours, our summer tour program was one of our most popular activities that we put on every year. And when we didn't reopen in June, people were clamoring for when we would be putting tours on again. And we just recently added a full slate of tours for August and most of them have already sold out because people are like, yes, finally. Which is very interesting because it's very opposite of what you're experiencing. Whereas our museum, which is self-guided, we set up a self-guided system for the museum, has gotten crickets. It's very much people don't want to do that. They want the tour experience rather than the self-guided, which that may just be our community that they're used to the tours. They like the tours. Our tour guides are great. That's part of it is that we have such excellent tour guides which it's nice to see that they're so excited for us to come back with our tours. But it's also really difficult because we've had to limit the number of people we can have on the tours. And that was something we always had an issue with in the past of people who would just show up to do a tour, even though we had a limit to the number of people we could take on each tour. And now that we've had to even reduce that number, we're a little bit concerned about how people are going to react if they can't just show up and join a tour. Even though we've always had the system of putting a number on the tours. It's just like it used to be 20 and now it's six or 12, depending on what tour it is. And so we're a little bit wary of how that's going to play out now that we are actually doing tours again, what the response is going to be. In the library with researchers, the main difference that we've had to implement with people, and again, we've tried to over-communicate our new policies and procedures to help people figure out what they want to do or how to do what they want to do properly. The main difference is that we are now requesting a day's notice of what materials they want to look at. We never used to ask that before. Anyone could, you could just walk in and say, I'm gonna look at this thing now and I would say, okay, great, let me go get it for you. And now I have to tell them, no, it's not available. You have to call me in advance and let me know what it is you're looking at. We've had a couple of snags with that in part because people are still getting used to the idea of, well, what do I actually want to look at for this particular research visit? But we are getting through it. People, again, like you said, they want to do the right thing. They want to do it properly. They just need to get used to it. And for a lot of our researchers, that's a very new experience of having to think that far in advance and not just showing up with, well, this is my question. What should, what do I want to look at and actually having to talk to me in advance before they get here for their research appointments? Yeah, I will say that indoor experiences that I've seen around the state are at about 35% of normal visitation. I was talking about outdoor experiences and we're seeing 75 to 100% visitation of last year. So I think those people would take our tours, but they're not necessarily unhappy that we're not offering tours. Something that you said that was really interesting too, Marietta, was that I do feel like life in general, you need more planning now, right? There's like not spontaneous like, I'm gonna go here. Like I feel like now I'm like, okay, does everyone have a mask? Like does everyone have, do we have the wipes? Just even things like that, like life takes a touch more planning. And in my head, I compare it a lot to when I was a kid and going to the airport was like a fun thing that you could just like run around the airport and it could go crazy. And then obviously when 9-11 happened, all of a sudden it's like, wait, we have to plan a bit more to go to the airport. You can only go to certain sections. So it's been kind of, I feel like we're in another big like cultural shift right now when it comes to just going to museums or enjoying them. Greg, did you have something to say when it came to just? Yeah, because one of the things that Ben said, really hit home for me and that has to do with how personnel, how our staff is reacting. And even in a small staff, we see clearly that each individual has a different approach to what's going on, you know? Pretty much everyone in the time, their downtime and beyond kind of thinks of themselves as an expert on what we should and shouldn't be doing. And I don't mean that as a pejorative. I think that everyone is trying to do their level best to educate themselves. And for our community, that creates a lot of disparity because our county has only seen about 340 positives. So out of a county of about 80,000 people. So for many people in our community, COVID is still in the abstract. It's not something that has hit home for a lot of people. And as a consequence, you have these divergent opinions of what we should be doing within the staff, as well as within our community. And trying to listen to all sides, but also making sure that as an organization, we as leadership are taking the steps that are best practice for the moment, understanding that they have to be reviewed constantly and updated constantly is very hard because it is a situation of really managing every staff member and each staff member's passions, biases, own experiences to be able to move forward. Because each time we've shifted, I'll give you a good example. I think it's a good example. In the beginning of July, we decided that we would do limited classes outdoors. And if we needed to do the weather, we could move it into a large multi-purpose room if we kept under 10 people. Within staff, this became a real bone of contention because there were many staff members who didn't believe we should be doing classes at all. There were other staff members who thought, well, why aren't we doing this in the classroom? We'd still be able to keep distancing. We'd have the mask mandate. The other counter argument, as I had mentioned before, is that our mandate didn't really have teeth at the time. We ended up cancelling in-person classes because there was so much turmoil between the staff members as to what we would be doing. And I would say it was an eye-opening experience for me as the director to understand that there are certain things where you have such divergent voices and strong divergent voices that there's really no getting to a point of, okay, here's what the best science we have right now says we can do or what we can't do. Sometimes it has to come down to making a decision based on passions of the staff, especially for a small staff, to make sure that we can continue to go forward. Now, it's a very unscientific way of doing things, but when it comes to management, understanding the levels of stress that people are going, are operating under, we've found that it's sometimes necessary for the greater good to make those decisions based on how does the staff, what's the staff comfort level, what's their working relationship with one another and how will our decision-making affect that? Yeah, I think that's super important. Even when it comes into access to the collections areas and the staff you have within them, it's kind of making sure everyone is comfortable in these new situations we find ourselves in. A really interesting comment that just came in the chat, which again, if anyone wants to participate on there, please do so, says, are any of your, let me hasten this by saying, obviously we were dealing with COVID and what's going on and at the same time, the BLM movement kind of happened and a lot of other new questions arose just a kind of cultural institution. So the question is, are any of your organizations considering revisiting the context of what you have on display, considering the current social unrest and cultural awareness and sensitivity? I mean, I know for a bit, we were all on pause and everyone was kind of ready to open, but then obviously when the social questions started popping up, everyone had to kind of step back a little bit, especially if you were located in an urban area and kind of go, okay, hold on, now we're dealing with a whole other level right now of what's happening. So did anyone have any experiences with that within their community or their organization? Mickey, do you have any thoughts? Well, we were already planning an exhibition called Black Stories. It wasn't widely known in the community, but we had already been planning for a year. As a result, I'm really looking, and they've kind of added on the last minute, well, maybe it wasn't the last minute edition, but it's going to take over a lot of our, we have three separate buildings, three separate architects, and there's going to be pieces throughout the buildings. And in one small gallery, they're going to show our very limited African art. I think we have like 127 African objects. It's very small, but it's not the best research portion of our collection. So I'm really making sure we know where things came from and making sure, and having those conversations about how are we presenting this to the public and how are we thinking about this from a cultural standpoint, instead of just installing it on a pedestal, and that's what our curators are always doing, and they do a great job, but it's just every time something like this, there's always changes and better ways to do it and better ideas. And so it's always kind of like, it's always a good idea to look at your collections and think about how you can do better. And did you have something you wanted to add? Yeah, I mean, I think for us here, I was pretty much very involved in it from the get go. I mean, from just the security and risk standpoint, I got a call pretty early on Friday afternoon that there were protests happening very close to our properties and that this was, I think the night after several of our staff have, there were fires, these was the fire on Lindale and Hiawatha and it was very close to home for not only our properties, but also our staff who were up all night worried that their house would be kind of in the ranks of it. So it was definitely a huge kind of staff response from that kind of boots down level and future conversation happened. A lot of stuff we got together. We've been utilizing Google Suite since for a long time now, but we actually, once we went to teleworking and got a couple of new additions on there, like Google Chat, Google Hangouts, and things to make work better. And one of the things that kind of came from that was a social justice chat, which was really great for staff to kind of engage in this conversation and also ask questions about how are we responding, what's the goal? For my own personal experience, I was responding directly to the potential risk to our sites and our buildings. We are on, the History Center is one of our, like I said, our main sites in St. Paul, kind of where some of the collections house and museum we've got, it's a very large building and it's on the Capitol complex with the Minnesota State Capitol right there. So we had the National Guard all on the property and walking around and for several days, actually probably for over a week, but kind of several days trying to keep in touch with our security on the ground, what's going on, as we're teleworking and trying to respond to this from a far, several miles away. But so it was definitely an interesting experience and I think from the collection standpoint, one of the main conversations that I've seen and noticed on that chat is what are we gonna save? How does this look in conversations? What is this look for exhibits? Because there were boards that went up all around businesses here in Minneapolis and I'm sure in other cities as well, that became pieces of art and became kind of a conversation starter and a very good look at what was going on and kind of the community, community response to it. And I think this is a conversation that's happening with peer institutions across Minneapolis, across Minnesota right now is how, how do we create a space to have these conversations and save these, but then the community that they should be in, you know, there's always this kind of ethical question about what's in our collections versus what's on display and what do we choose to house. So I think it's an opportunity to be a little bit more proactive in kind of planning the exhibits and what's on display and things like that rather than reactive when events like this occur. So from that personal standpoint and kind of my position as security and risk and then also from a little bit more of the historical society's kind of view per view as well, that's kind of my take on that. I really like how you said that, how it's the proactive element to it. Cause I do think that it, you know, we were all in, still are kind of in this heightened sense of just like, you know, what's going to happen next and something when that, when all that started, it did have a lot of people step back and kind of be like, okay, what are we really protecting? What is in this collections? How is it being represented? All these questions kind of like really bubbled up that many of us have been talking about for years. I mean, that's one thing I will say for our museum community, you know, I'm pretty good amount of it. We've always known we've had these issues, you know what I mean? And I think it really did bring it to a head in a good way to have to deal with. Well, we have about five. Oh, sorry, go ahead. Well, I think just quickly, you know, I think a lot of us in this field feel really compelled socially and morally to collect these things, to have these conversations. I think sometimes we do need to take a step back and just realize that, you know, museums don't have the best track record with cultural appropriation. And, you know, we still struggle. We represent a state historical society in Minnesota that, you know, was founded on racism and still struggles with systemic racism. And we want to have more diverse staff and we lack, we have some community partnerships that are really strong, but we lack others. And so I would just encourage museums to, for collection staff to partner with public program staff and maybe ways that we don't always do that and really work with those communities. You know, we want to collect those things that those public art pieces, those artifacts that have to do with George Floyd, but only if those communities want us to. And so we really do need to take a step back and even if we mean well, really listen to other people and work with them where they're at. Yep, that's the key thing is it when you, and I think that's regardless of size. So I think even like small, mid-size, whatever, it's our job, anyone's job, who works for a cultural institution to reach out to these communities and do what they want to do. You know what I mean? And not to have this, you know, work together. That's all it really is. So as the shows, I have elementary age children in my house that I'm always just like, let's just work together. Cause everything will be a lot better in the long run. We have a few minutes left. So what I'd like to do is just go around and kind of get your current status right now as to where you're at. I think we kind of heard that a little bit earlier but I just want to check in. I know here in Florida, who knows? Right now things are opening, but obviously we've pulled back quite a bit, especially in Iowa and Southern Florida. So we have pulled back on what we're doing. There's a real question as to what our opening process is right now. Northern Florida, slightly different story. So it's kind of interesting to see how our state has reacted to it. Greg, can you tell us kind of what your status is and what it's looking like for you in the next few months? Yeah. I can say that we are open with what would be our normal hours. Like I had said, we created the art path, the single circuit throughout the museum. One thing that definitely is clear on our mind is what is going to happen with the return of schools. And that affects not only our community reaction for visitors, but also staff and huge staff questions with possibility of many of my staff members not being able to work here. And if they're commuting, doing telecommuting, that becomes very difficult to just keep the place open so that really the next few months we're really going to be concerned about that. And on the flip side, trying to leverage what we have to be able to react to those things and other needs of our community to really make sure that as a public organization that we are looking at what our neighbors need and trying to match what our skill set and our collections to the needs of the community. And I think that's a huge thing that we are going to put full effort into over the next few months. Yeah. The staffing thing I think is gonna be a struggle for many of us, that is for sure. Marietta, what about you guys? How's it looking? Sorry, my computer froze for a second. So we, fortunately, the Albany area, the Capital District area, the Schenectady area, our cases are going down. And the health of our community is pretty good and we're very excited about that. We hope that that continues into the fall, but we are, so we're cautiously optimistic about the fall, but we are actually sort of thinking about what would happen if we did have to shut down again. And so we had started a bunch of online activities. We're putting some of our exhibits up online that we had never done before, broadening our collections catalogs so that more information is available through our online catalogs. So we started Facebook live streams. The other thing we started to look at in the spring is online versions of our school programs so that teachers could just plug in and start doing school programs, but virtually. And we are sort of digging down into those again to try and, now that we have reopened and we've sort of figured that part out, we're now looking at the fall and going, okay, what happens if we shut down again? And how can we do what we started in the spring and bring it back in the fall? That in addition to maintaining what we're doing with our open hours and with the visitors that we are getting on site, in particular the researchers that are coming into the library. So it's kind of a balancing act of trying to prepare for a likely fall shutdown, even though things look good really right now, but also trying to be optimistic about maybe we can continue what we're doing up through the end of the year. That's interesting because someone in the comments literally just said, have any of you developed Zoom internet programs to reach schools? So that was good timing. Yeah, we're working on that. That's very funny. Mickey, what about you guys? Well, we are doing things, things are going well with the opening, but I mean, obviously our cases in Iowa are much higher now than they were in March when we shut down. So people are nervous and scared. And so I like what Ben talked about as well about taking care of our staff. And so I'm personally making a concerted effort to really just check in with people and talk about workloads and how can we make this work for people working at home and how can we take care of our collections but also take care of our families and ourselves and finding that balance that everybody is trying to do in this universal. And we have a great creative teams in our education department, our marketing departments, putting all these great things that I have not much to do with, putting all these things out online, all these great programs. We have a great video that tells people when they come to visit, what our expectations are, it's very clever. We have utilizing images in the public domain. We have a great education team doing all sorts of virtual classes and all these people with all these great ideas. So I think we're doing the best we can, just like everybody else, so. And Ann and Ben, what are you guys, what's it looking like for you guys? Oops. Go ahead, Ann. I was trying to find the mute there, I got a little lost. So for us right now with the fall, we're, our return to work team has been meeting on a weekly basis on every Monday and we're really kind of concerned about the fall and potential need to close again. Our sites network is really open from like spring to fall. So if the fall happens, I don't see it really impacting our outdoor operations whether or not that would just happen if there was a stay home order. But we are preparing in case we're keeping that continuity plan up to date, we're looking at the continuity staffing levels, making sure that that list is continuing to stay current and kind of what are the activities and what's the status of each one of our properties so that we can make the change if it has to be by site depending on outbreak because we are all over the state. So some states, some sites are gonna be impacted either a little bit more or less if there's not a statewide ordinance. We've seen in the past some Minneapolis and St. Paul ordinances go into place that have just affected the sites in that area and not any of our out-state sites. So we're having to kind of juggle as those happen and just making sure that we're documenting every decision that's made, how it was made and what documents like guidelines or policies that we created based on that so that we can very quickly refer back to it. If needed. Yeah, just to add onto that, a little bit. We've got three museums and five self-guided trails that are currently open. Three more are slated to open October 1st. We're really planning that no Minnesota K-12 schools will want to do field trips or not enough of them to do field trips this year and the majority of our historic buildings are targeting spring 2021 opening and if we don't have spring field trips which we're anticipating that probably a June 1st opening. So if anybody has any questions in the live chat wants to email me ben.lenard at mnhs.org feel free to send an email, happy to help. We'll put the contact information for all of our speakers on our website. Our website's address is connecting to collections.org. I want to give a huge thanks to all of our speakers. Thanks for taking about an hour today. I really enjoyed hearing your stories and you're being candid and talking about how this is kind of a messy process for all of this but we're kind of learning and I've been pretty proud about how the museum community has stepped forward and really trying to work with across the country is really just trying to figure this out and we're just trying to keep people in the collection safe. So thanks again to you guys as a reminder connecting to collections.org is an IMLS supported program. So we want to say thanks to them. Thanks to FAIC who's the supporter of this program and please do check out our website for any future webinars that we are having. Everyone again, thank you. Stay safe and we will see you soon. Thank you. Thanks everyone. Nice to meet you.