Looking Back and Looking Forward

This semester is not what anyone thought it would be.

Now, somewhere around week eight or nine of being confined to our homes, the importance of digital public history is immensely clear. With museums, libraries, and universities closed, it’s all we have.

Throughout this course, we’ve looked at unique ways to engage with the audience in various digital media – online deep maps, digital exhibits, interactive digital elements in physical spaces, etc. If I had to guess, as we go forward, these digital components will become more and more central to the work of cultural institutions. Because who knows when we’ll have to shut down the doors and do quarantine all over again.

This course has taught me that I have so much more to learn. To make meaningful contributions to digital efforts in my career, I’ll have to get my feet wet with different mapping tools, website builders, and other things I probably don’t even know the proper terms for. From here on out, I’ll be making a concentrated effort to keep up with what museums are trying so I can use them for inspiration later in life.

Looking forward, it’s hard to imagine how the museum experience is going to change once the world reopens. It seems like I’ve scrolled past hundreds of posts, full of conjecture. Some foretell doom – it’s the end of museums as we know it. Some proclaim that all will go back to normal, eventually. It’s nearly impossible to say which is the case.

Will people stay away in fear or will people flood cultural institutions, hungry for any kind of outside entertainment? Close to my house, huge crowds swarmed the streets as bars and restaurants illegally reopened. People went wild. Some even sold booze on the street. There was not a mask to be seen. So, this anecdotal example, paired with state house protests, shows one possible future. Some people may care for their own entertainment, their own “liberation,” over the safety of others.

If this truly is the case, museums are going to have to tread a difficult balance between protecting visitors and looking to make money again. The longer this goes on, the harder museums are going to have to fight to stay alive. Opening up, for many museums, means bringing in ticket revenue again. But, it could also play into a second wave of the virus. The next few weeks will bring some difficult decisions for museum administrations across the country.

Like many of my colleagues, I’m excited to walk back into a museum again. I’m excited to be able to work anywhere but my dining room table. I want to see my friends and walk around in public without fear. Sometimes it feels like it’s been months since life was normal, sometimes it feels like time has passed by incredibly fast. All of us want to go back to normal, no one knows what “normal” is going to look like after this. It’s hard to draw a conclusion to this, because so much is up in the air.

As public-facing historians, dipping our toes in the digital realm, perhaps there was no better time for this class to take place. Even though the course changed dramatically, we got the opportunity to think critically about digital engagement in a time where the stories, collections, and programming of museums only exist online. We’re living in interesting times. Let’s hope they make us more effective museum professionals.