The trick to museums, believes Anna Rubin, is people actually being there.
“We’re all so used to looking at screens and images and reproductions,” said Rubin, external relations director at the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium in St. Johnsbury. “The value for being in the museum, sometimes, is coming face to face with an object that has history.”
Covid-19 has made that experience hard to capture as museums and cultural centers across the state stay shut down. But amid the pandemic, these institutions are looking to new ways of engaging and serving their communities.
Take the Old Stone House Museum in Brownington, which tells the history of Orleans County with a special focus on one of its most prominent residents, Alexander Twilight.
The museum had long planned to open an outdoor recreation trail through its 54-acre field and parts of its historic village, said Molly Veysey, its director.
“When Covid-19 hit, this could not be more serendipitous timing for this project … to really give people a way to access the museum in a safe, outdoor-recreation setting where people are going to be more comfortable,” she said.
The trail, set to be built by the end of July with the Northwoods Stewardship Center, will be lined with signs offering interpretations of the landscape around the rural museum. It’ll take visitors past each of the campus’ historic buildings, too, with posted signs acting as tour guides.
The ECHO Leahy Center in Burlington also wants to get people outside. The science museum has been issuing weekly citizen-science challenges through social media, asking Vermonters to do things like track bird migration or record cloud patterns.
“When you come into ECHO, you’re taking in the aquaria,” said Erik Oliver, the center’s director of development and communications. “Now what we’re asking you to do is to find a lot of those amphibians and animals out in the wild.”
Oliver said the goal is to get communities — especially children — to be more observant about the natural world and the science that can be found far from ECHO’s lakeside facility.
Museums and science centers are expanding into the digital realm, too.
Old Stone House’s virtual tour of its spaces — which started a year and a half ago — is receiving as much web traffic now as it did on launch, Veysey said. And she’s hearing from some guests that the remote tour might actually be their preference in the future.
The museum’s website lets people look around 360 degrees inside each room of its historic buildings, with clickable spots on the floor allowing guests to virtually walk around and inspect exhibits.
Veysey said the museum is looking into an upgrade that would pair virtual guests with a tour guide who can answer questions live afterward.
Many of the museum’s programs — on beekeeping, composting and the like — are being run digitally, too. Veysey hosts one about gardening that will include downloadable planting calendars for participants to fill out.
The Shelburne Museum, with more than 150,000 works spread over 39 exhibition buildings, is bringing its collection to the public through its website and social media. Among the offerings are regular tours through Facebook Live and webinars hosted by curators.
In Vergennes, the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum over the past month has been uploading video scuba tours of shipwrecks in the lake to its YouTube channel. The videos show footage from underwater cameras as a voiceover relays the history of each wreck.
And ECHO is now streaming science shows and stories for kids on Facebook and YouTube, focusing on experiments they can do with common household items. One short clip last week challenged viewers to shape a sheet of tin foil so that it could float while holding a clump of coins.
The switch hasn’t necessarily been easy.
“Capturing kids’ attention is going to be a fairly sizable challenge these days,” said Oliver, from the ECHO Center, “with everything online and parents not having as many supports as they’re used to.”
That’s an acute challenge for historical museums, like the Old Stone House, whose buildings are as much a part of the experience as their exhibits.
“That sense of place is so important,” Veysey said. “To kind of bring that through a virtual platform is really difficult. You can hope for the best, but I think there’s always going to be something missing.”
Because of that, museum reps said they’re eager to reopen.
The Fairbanks may open up its doors over the summer, said Rubin, the museum’s spokesperson. The number of guests allowed inside at once would likely be restricted though, she said, and staff might create a flow system — like those now in some supermarkets — so that people can’t wander around freely.
In the meantime, museums are doing their best to bring themselves to their communities.
ECHO, the Vermont Institute of Natural Science, the Fairbanks and the Montshire Museum of Science teamed up at the end of April to form FourScienceVT, a consortium that aims to pool resources and provide learning materials for schoolchildren statewide.
The Old Stone House plans to fill 500 square feet of soil with produce for local food pantries in the poorer parts of Orleans County, a twofold increase in space over its usual community garden. Staff and volunteers are prepping the ground now, and after June 1, they’ll start planting, said Veysey.
“The focus is less on heritage this year and more on, ‘Let’s get as much produce to the community as possible,’” she said.
For her, and others across the state, the thought was how to be most helpful as staple community hubs.
“You always want to feel like you’re connected to your community and your own history,” she said “There are such pressing needs in our community.”
Editor’s note: This story was updated to include information about programs at the Shelburne Museum.
