The impact of COVID-19 on museums in the digital era: Practices and challenges in Hong Kong

Purpose - During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, museums, as public gathering places for citizens, have encountered unprecedented difficulties due to limitations to operate as usual for their traditional exhibitions and curations. Thus, museums made corresponding emergency attempts to accelerate digital resource and service platform constructions. Such difficulties aroused many potential problems with the applicability of electronic resources and the mismatch between user expectations and museum services. This study investigates the challenges faced by Hong Kong museums under COVID-19, emergency responses and deliberate practices of Hong Kong museums from the perspective of both museum staff and visitors, and COVID-19's influence on the roles and functions of Hong Kong museums. Design/methodology/approach - Qualitative interviews with museum staff and visitors were conducted to collect opinions and experiences in the construction and maintenance of museums during the pandemic. Further thematic analyses of museum websites, evaluations, and suggestions were formulated guided by the PEST (Political, Economic, Social, Technological) and AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) models. Findings - Findings revealed many online interactions and offline renovations, but the perceptions of visitors and staff differed considerably. While online resources and virtual museums were expanded and well received, long-term prohibitions and repressions drove physical visit desire. Participants emphasized finding a balance between user expectations and realistic practices. Originality/value - Scant studies focus on the impact of COVID-19 on the cultural industry, especially in East Asia. This study also highlights new practices of digitalization and the challenges of functional transformation. The authors' findings and suggestions provide hints to optimize the curation of information resources and improve museum service quality in the new digital era. This study also serves as a reliable and meaningful record of COVID-19 impacts on Hong Kong museums.

Virtual Museum Visits in a Pandemic: Older Adults Discuss Experiences of Art, Culture and Social Connection

This paper focuses on a series of guided virtual museum visits designed for older adults over the COVID-19 pandemic. The visits were undertaken as part of a research project in collaboration with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) and brought together small groups of older adults for weekly guided visits facilitated by trained guides. The visits were held for twelve weeks between March and May 2021. We conducted a qualitative study on the visits, which included weekly observations as well as interviews with the older tour participants, the guides and the research and museum staff to understand the experiences of the virtual guided museum tours from the perspective of older adults. We explore how virtual museum tours provide opportunities for engagement with art, technologies and people, especially during the pandemic when visits to the museum were limited by social distancing measures. We bring these findings into conversation with our previous work with on-site museum visits and reflect on questions related to accessibility of virtual museum visits as well as the challenges for socialization. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Museums from Home: Digital Activities of Croatian Museums during the COVID-19 Disease Pandemic

In March 2020, Croatian museums closed their doors for several weeks to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The period of physical confinement was further extended for some Zagreb museums that were severely damaged in the earthquake. After opening, as in many other museums in Europe and the world, physical visits continued to decline and museums recorded a drastic drop in visitors and financial losses. In response to the current situation, with the aim of continuing to fulfil their social, cultural and educational function, museums have turned to the internet and social networks as places for dialogue with users, dissemination of content and presentation of events that couldn’t be physically organized. Many museums devoted themselves to creation of online resources such as digital exhibitions, virtual tours, e-learning materials, online conferences and tried to connect with their audiences in different ways and on different platforms. The aim of this paper was to investigate how Croatian museums have adapted their services and contents to new business conditions by using digital media. The paper analyses and evalu-ates the activities of museums on websites and social networks in one year period since the beginning of the pandemic. The results indicate a quantitatively as well as qualitatively rich online museums’ presence that could mark the beginning of a new era in digital communication and dissemination of heritage content. The research concludes that the digitization of museum activities is necessary for the future sustainability of museum functions and encourages further reflection on the direction of digital access to culture and heritage. © 2021 Institut za društvena istraživanja u Zagrebu – Institute for Social Research in Zagreb Sva prava pridržana – All rights reserved.

INTERFACES OF SOCIAL MEMORY: MUSEUMS, VIRTUALITY, ACTUALITY

This work aims to present part of the master's dissertation "Interfaces of Social Memory", defended by the author in 2017, expanding the reflections, to think about the field of social memory and cultural heritage from the Covid-19 pandemic. Through the characterization of digital culture, cyberculture, cybrid culture, interface culture and memory culture, it recognizes the movement of virtualization of memory and the interface of culture that makes humanity immerse itself in screens and networks, real-time and cyberspace. It presents four museological phenomena and one memorialistic phenomenon to reflect on the virtuality/actuality of museums, and the virtual forms of memorialization emerging from cyberculture. It considers the role of the interfaces of social memory in the virtual/actual processes of musealization and memorialization since they have the potential to enable the dialogue between historical memory and living memory, absorbing the notion of place of memory and memory medium.

Virtual Galleries and Museums in Search of Their Own Specific Identity

In the spring of 2021, with the spread of the covid pandemic, there was a strong acceleration of interest in the virtual worlds. In particular, many galleries and museums without a virtual version had to consider the hypothesis of creating a presence in the web. All this has raised a number of issues related to the identity of virtual spaces. It is necessary to understand, in fact, if they should be twins of real spaces or if they can have their own defined and independent physiognomy. Furthermore, we need to rethink the very identity of virtual space, which does not necessarily must have the features of a walkable and navigable space, but can also be an environment defined by multimedia content. Here, in addition to addressing various crucial issues, such as storytelling in virtual exhibition spaces, some suggestions for good practices within galleries and museums are considered. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Development of e-service virtual museum tours in Poland during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

Dynamically developing ICT technologies have become a tool to accelerate the creation of information societies around the world. Thanks to it, many traditional services have found a new digital space to function and thus achieve a global dimension. One example can be virtual museums, which provide access to their resources for every interested person having Internet connection. There is no doubt that the most spectacular and effective representation of digital museums are virtual walks, bringing, apart from cognitive aspects and good entertainment. In the era of the pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and international quarantine which limits mobility, e-services gave humanity the opportunity and a substitute for normal existence. The interest in e-services has increased, which has been directly translated into increased informational awareness. Favourable conditions as well as relatively low costs and technical complexity of creating virtual walks have led the authors to adopt the following hypothesis: during the period of the quarantine caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus pandemic, museums are actively and dynamically developing virtual walks services. In the presented article, on the basis of research and analysis, the authors will test the hypothesis, as well as asses the level of virtual walks around monuments and museum centres in Poland.