Here’s our weekly round-up of our favorite things that were said about museums this week: the good, the bad, and the really quite strange! Editorial: Museum exhibit settles the question of Picasso Storyland ties fun with early literacy skills at Portland Children’s Museum Geology museum …
reposted from editor emeritus Amanda Kay Gustin. False Impressions: The Hunt for Big Time Art Fakes Thomas Hoving This book is fairly typical of all Hoving’s popular works, which is to say it’s uncomfortably gossipy, breathtakingly arrogant, and compulsively readable. The overall narrative of the …
by columnist Madeline Karp
Lately, a series of weird things have been happening at my museum. A short while back, Philadelphia had massive wind and rainstorms. In a matter of two weeks, we experienced no less than two power failures and a flood. It sounds drastic to call them disasters, but had the museum staff been unprepared to handle the situation, there certainly could have been disastrous consequences.
Given our recent roller coaster ride, I thought this might be a good moment to go over good museum practice. In case of emergency…what should you do??
1. Know your museum’s emergency preparedness plan.
Do you know where your department meets for a head count in case of a fire drill? How about where visitors should go in case of a power failure?
Knowing where to go and what to do in case of an emergency helps maintain calm among visitors and employees. When the power went out at the Please Touch Museum, all of the museum staff ushered visitors into the main hall. Parents and children remained calm, because the staff was calm. Yes, something was amiss, but there was no need to panic. Everyone knew where to go and what to do. During the flood, operations managers and cleaning staff knew the most efficient ways to eliminate the water and the smell. The museum opened for business as usual, with only a few extra “Wet Floor” signs hinting that something had happened.
CHECK: Does your museum have an emergency preparedness plan or handbook?
2. Have back up programming.
What do you do when your lecturer suddenly gets sick? Or when your museum experiences a power failure? Having a back up plan can keep you from having to cancel events.
Instead of kicking people out, the PTM staff jumped into action. No, visitors couldn’t see the theater show during the power outage, but they could attend an interactive story time in the main hall! Using costumes and puppets, Education, Visitor Services and Community Outreach staff worked together to put on educational programming that connected stories, puppets, games and songs to appropriate learning standards. Children learned about the parts of bugs and played with various bug puppets, and were read stories about sharing and making friends. Visitors had so much fun playing this way, there was a little disappointed groan when the lights came back on a short while later.
CHECK: Do you have back up programs? Having an emergency program (and a battery powered microphone kit) up your sleeve never hurts!
3. Practice good stewardship – Keep things off the floor!
Floods happen for a variety of reasons. Ours was thanks to heavy rain and a blocked sewer system. Museum staffers came in to over a foot of water in the some parts of the basement, and a less-than-pleasant smell.
The Community Outreach department had a program later that day. Thankfully, because they stored their supplies off the floor, none of their materials were wet or damaged. But several file boxes left on the floor were water damaged. It is always easier to save supplies damaged by water than those damaged by fire; however, storing your files, collections and program aids correctly can prevent any damage at all.
CHECK: Are your supplies and collections stored according to good stewardship practices? Need a refresher? (It’s okay, we all do sometimes.) Check out AAM’s guide to good collections stewardship here.
4. Know who to call and when.
A visitor falls down the stairs and injures herself. Someone’s Nalgene explodes, spilling water all over the floor. A researcher accidentally tears a priceless document in the reading room. Who do you call?
At the children’s museum, we experience a lot of spills, involving both liquids and people. It’s important to know when to call in the cleaning crew, the supervisor or even an ambulance.
CHECK: Do you know who to call and when? If not, familiarize yourself with your museum’s First Aid policies and emergency cleaning procedures.
5. Teamwork is everything.
When something goes awry, it’s stressful for EVERYONE. In case of emergency, keep calm, and lend a helping hand wherever you can. I’m so proud of the way my colleagues handled themselves these past few weeks. Just when we thought nothing else could go wrong – the power would go out again. Sticking together and helping each other has really made us a stronger team.
And while our forays into emergency preparedness have been exciting (dare I say…fun?) let’s keep our fingers crossed that our dance with disaster is over for a little while.
Has your museum experienced a disaster? What did you do? Which policies helped? Which needed work? Share your stories with me in the comments!
Here’s our weekly round-up of our favorite things that were said about museums this week: the good, the bad, and the really quite strange! Also, in honor of Valentine’s Day, The Museum of Broken Relationships popped up again. While more a travelling exhibit than anything …
by columnist Catherine Sigmond Maybe I have a weekend of blizzard-induced daydreams of traveling far and wide (anything to get out of the house, really) to thank, but recently I have been craving a more global perspective when contemplating the museum world. According to Museum …
by columnist Madeline Karp
I’m ashamed to tell you how I learned about Hemingway cats. It was not in a high school literature class, nor an intro to evolutionary sciences lecture. No, I learned about the six-toed felines from Tiger Beat Magazine – Backstreet Boy Nick Carter owned one. Obviously as a BSB-loving tweener, I found this detail totally important, and filed it away for future use.
The future is now!
“Hemingway” is a colloquial term for a polydactyl feline; it’s a cat with extra toes. They’re quite common in New England, but are instead called Boston thumb cats, Vermont snowshoe cats, or mitten cats. Folklore bounces between Boston seafarers considering them lucky, and frightened Puritans killing them for being witches’ familiars.
Here in the Mid-Atlantic, we don’t have any particular superstitions about them, but we do call them Hemingway cats because many are descended from Ernest Hemingway’s beloved six-toed pet, Snowball.
Currently, 40-odd Hemingway cats reside in the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum in Key West, Florida. They have complete run of the place – they are allowed to sleep on the furniture, walk around the yard and more or less do what they like as Snowball’s “heirs.”
But, according to the federal government, the museum is toeing the line (if you will), by refusing to follow federal regulations regarding the treatment, exhibition and transport of animals under the Animal Welfare Act. (For more on that, click here.) Because the cats are used in museum advertising, are highlighted on tours, and have their likenesses sold in the museum gift shop, they are legally considered part of the museum’s collection.
The museum has cried foul, saying they follow state and local regulations by feeding the cats, giving them regular vet visits, and spaying and neutering when necessary. Museum staffers say the cats aren’t part of the collection because they don’t deal directly with Hemingway’s legacy – just Snowball’s. So long as the cats are not mistreated, they say, it’s none of the government’s business.
However, a recent U.S. Court of Appeals ruling has stated that the museum must, in fact, abide by the Department of Agriculture’s rules. Whether or not they like it, legally the museum is subject to the agency’s whim; since 2003 the government has threatened cat confiscation, shut down tours for federal investigations, recommended the museum hire a night watchman for the cats, and stipulated that the museum must install higher fences and have specific food and water dispensers. As one can imagine, sudden changes to such federal policy could wreak havoc on the museum’s budget.
I understand why the federal government wants to regulate the Hemingway cats. But every time federal agents have reported on the cats, they’ve found little more than fat, happy cats with a few extra toes. The cats rarely wander off the property and it seems the museum is as attentive to the felines as any domestic pet owner. This seems to me like little more than red tape and a waste of time and tax dollars.
However, if you use the cats in museum advertising and tourists come specifically to see them, how can one argue that they’re not part of the collection? If an aggressive Hemingway cat wanders off the property (as cats will sometimes do) and bites someone, is the museum liable?
What do you think? Should the cats be accessioned as a living collection and regulated under federal law? Or is the museum just where they happen to live? Tell me your thoughts in the comments!
To learn more about the Hemingway cats and the Ernest Hemingway House’s legal battles, check out these articles: