The Milwaukee Public Museum Staff Finds Creative Ways to Reach Audiences During the COVID-19 Closure Through Online Education
Milwaukee's largest museum, and one of the largest natural history museums in the US, the Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM), closed to the public in mid-March and was expected to remain closed until July 1, 2020. On this page, Julie Quinlan Brame, Sr. VP of Development, discusses the sequence of events that led to the museum's closure, the effects of the closure on overall day-to-day operations and decision making, staff members and how they coped by working remotely while staying in daily contact with each other, and on the museum's members and donors. The staff adapted quickly by utilizing the museum website. Visitors were greeted by a home page entitled "Discover MPM at Home" and "Learning is always open at MPM". Like Jewish Museum Milwaukee, the staff developed a weekly email newsletter (the "Weekly Connection") which presented stories about artifacts in the MPM collections, activities for teachers, parents and children, a look behind the scenes ("MPM Insight 360"), trivia and short articles that played off the museum's familiar slogan "What Will You Find?". And, just in time for the COVID-19 closure, a collaborative project between the museum's IT professionals and Google begun in 2016 was unveiled - a virtual tour of the building's interior including every floor and every exhibit.
Julie Quinlan Brame discusses MPM management's decision to close one of the largest natural history museums in the Midwest on March 14, 2020, staff, member and donor reactions, the financial impacts from the loss of earned revenue, how donors are stepping up to help fill the budget gaps and the future of museum operations post-pandemic.
On March 12, 2020, Dr. Ellen Censky provided an update on MPM's commitment to keeping museum visitors safe while at the facility. Two days later, she announced that the museum would be closed indefinitely beginning at 5 pm on March 14, 2020.
An image of the landing page for MPM's virtual visitors during the 2020 pandemic, "Discover MPM at Home", "Learning is always open at MPM". This page was accessed via one click "inside" or after the homepage to easily direct visitors to the museum's new online content while MPM was closed.
MPM's Week 1 learning page including activities for younger children, MPM Insights and a look behind the scenes at the museum, MPM: Untold! series about the story behind the story and links to MPM's Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts with daily updates and fun facts.
MPM's Week 2 learning page including activities for younger children, MPM Insights and a look behind the scenes at the museum, a resource for learning more about transmission of viruses from animals to humans and links to MPM's Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts with daily updates and fun facts.
MPM's Week 3 learning page, now called "Weekly Connection", with activities for younger children reconnecting them to the popular butterfly garden and dinosaur exhibits, astronomy activities, MPM Insights (this week: Why do you do that? answers questions about specimen collecting), discoveries of new plant and animal species, and links to MPM's Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts with daily updates and fun facts.
"MPM Object Spotlight" - recorded presentations by second year UWM museum studies students highlighting a favorite artifact from the museums collections and providing an interpretation of the object's importance to human history, education, natural history and the social sciences.
The MPM "Planetarium at Home" webpage with abbreviated astronomy programs visitors can enjoy at home including the close approach of an asteroid to the Earth on April 29, Comet Atlas in the early evening sky after sunset, a discussion about asteroids and dinosaur extinction, Egyptian astronomy, origins of time (for young children), "The Solar System Show" on YouTube, and a look at Wisconsin's spring sky.
MPM's IT department and Google teamed up in 2016 to photograph every exhibit on every floor of the museum to create a virtual tour anyone can enjoy at home. After four years of work, the tour was released during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although most exhibits at MPM are permanent, this virtual tour includes a look backward in time at "Hidden Wisconsin", the temporary exhibit featured when Google photographed the museum's interior spaces to produce the "street views" contained in the virtual tour.