The undervalued power of museum-guided tours: a case study of Xuhui Art Museum in China

Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, how to attract back visitors has been a major problem for museums across the world. Among diverse museum activities, human-guided tours remain under-studied to date. A post-hoc case analysis on Xuhui Art Museum provided empirical evidence demonstrating the potential power of guided tours. Quantitative methods in content analysis and semantic network analysis were employed to identify general features of visitor comments from both visitor books and social media. An in-depth interview was also conducted with the Chief Curator. Results reveal that the work of ‘jiangjie', or tour guiding, is greatly appreciated and plays a vital role in improving visitor experience and satisfaction. This study calls for re-evaluation of the functions, potential and effects of tour guiding, and a renewal of live tours for better on-site experience in a post COVID-19 period.

Collections from the Asylum: Past Lives, Present Tense

Social history museums strive to present exhibitions that will connect to their local audience and provoke conversation as well as provide information. The aim of this article is to describe an exhibition about a decommissioned former mental hospital that is still significant for many in the local community. The exhibition consisted of various "collections” of objects and artworks assembled by the researchers in collaboration with museum staff, along with stories collected during our research into the asylum. Some "collections” included historical images and stories from the past alongside others of creative work and technology responding to the present. Community members were keenly interested in the exhibition, but the COVID-19 pandemic and consequent border closures in Australia meant that visitors needed to attend online presentations and virtual tours rather than see the exhibits in person. The use of digital presentations along with physical artefacts brought about a new way of thinking about presenting social history to future audiences.

Grading the Level of Inclusiveness in Museum Buildings: Ístanbul Modern Museum

Contemporary museums serve for education, research, and enjoyment, and their primary objectives are collection, documentation, and exhibition of cultural heritage. Thus, museum buildings have become common spaces of urban life through these new functions and activities rather than isolated exhibition spaces. They define inclusive complexes with educational research and social and public areas, establishing more effective interaction with society. These activities can be performed competently and appropriately depending on the multi-functional spatial configuration to provide urban experiences with participation and inclusiveness. In this context, this paper aims to study the level of inclusiveness of the first contemporary art museum of Ístanbul—Ístanbul Modern Museum—through detailed examinations of the architectural configuration with grading criteria based on spatial relations in terms of various facilities of the museum. The story of Ístanbul Modern started by re-functioning the old Bosphorus dock’s warehouses in 2004. The museum temporarily moved to another historic building in 2018, where it has also experienced new COVID-19 pandemic conditions. Ístanbul Modern is still in a process of moving back to its former location into a new building designed as a museum by Renzo Piano Building Workshop Architects. Through three phases, inclusivity and participation of buildings will be cross-examined on a developed rating-scale technique based on included sociocultural activities by their spatial sizes and relations through quantitative analysis. This methodology will provide preliminary knowledge for future research on museum architectonics.

Listening Whom, Listening What: Investigating Museum Audio Guides in Translation

This article addresses the role of language and quality translation in museum communication. The production of texts in museums is increasingly demanding as institutions are asked to rethink audience-oriented actions in co-design and diversity. This study is based on data provided by audio guides made available online to engage the public and provide free educational materials, something especially relevant in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis indicates that quality materials are crucial in understanding the exhibits and that accessibility may profit from multilingualism. We argue that tailoring texts can improve translation quality and provide more stimulating materials to diverse audiences.

Commerce, Culture, and Heritage : Souvenirs as Communicators of History in the Museum Shop

In heritage sites and museums, souvenir shops are of considerable commercial importance;furthermore, they add to the overall experience of visitors. This contribution explores the narrative quality of some souvenirs that seek to reflect a country’s history and heritage. Three examples will serve as case studies: (1) souvenirs depicting the Berlin Wall (Germany)—moving from a historical event toward wider-reaching generic ideas, such as freedom;(2) souvenirs commemorating the First World War and their role in the context of the War’s centenary (England);and (3) souvenirs that reflect aspects of dark tourism (various locations). In each case, the narrative attached to the items for sale potentially removes them from the experience of the exhibition. As such, souvenirs in the shop offer an experience in their own right, but they do not necessarily echo the culture, heritage, or history of a region or a country.

Bring Your Own (Accessible) Device : A Mobile Guide Solution for Promoting Accessibility, Social Distancing, and Autonomy in Museums

COVID-19 presented new challenges to museums in 2020 and 2021 as they were required to either temporarily close or reduce capacity and adhere to strict health and safety guidelines. These changes required finding new approaches to safely provide accessible content to visitors, as traditional solutions involve sharing objects, technologies, or gathering in groups to listen to a docent, read exhibit signage, or touch an artifact. We address this challenge using an approach we call BYOAD (Bring Your Own Accessible Device), where visitors’ personal mobile devices are used to access museum content. We believe this approach supports a more accessible and autonomous experience for visitors during social distancing and beyond. We describe our work partnering with a New York City museum to make a BYOAD web-based mobile guide that was available to all visitors and replaced their accessibility offerings. The guide features visual descriptions of artifacts, non-visual wayfinding directions to exhibitions, summaries of exhibit content in easy-to-read bullet points, open-captioned videos kept under two minutes, video transcripts, and photos with alt text. Our mobile guide launched in September 2020 and has been viewed over 9,000 times to date. We have conducted on-site observations and interviewed six members of the museums’ advisory council to understand the impact and potential for this approach. This article provides recommendations for researchers and practitioners on the design of BYOAD mobile guides, including: (1) designing accessible guides that are appropriate for cultural constraints;(2) building the guide using the web;and (3) leveraging existing technology to deepen visitors understanding of museum content.

The Met and the COVID crisis

On the morning of Thursday, 12 March, the director and president of The Metropolitan Museum called an impromptu meeting with the heads of the various departments. This was followed up by an all-staff memo announcing that at the end of the day the museum would close until at least 4 April but probably longer.  For myself, I am finding this a time for reflection about museums and their mission in a changed and changing world (about which I have written elsewhere, in different times: https://doi.org/10.1080/09647775.2018.1468007) and the various ways in which curatorial work might help our visitors connect to the works in our care. And this ‘pause’ has provided a unique moment for sustained thinking about the collection and, specifically, the online catalogue that I have prioritized within the department as a means of communicating our current understanding of the great works in our care to our global audience.

The Empty Museum: A Southeast Asian Perspective

We now regard the COVID-19 pandemic as a disaster like no other caught as we were, by the lack of foresight into its impacts on our lives and our work. With the creative and tourism industries most affected, museums were forced to reinvent their management strategies. In the context of Southeast Asia, the most immediate shock was the absence of visitors around mid-March 2020 when museums were forced to close and only a handful of staff were allowed to report for work to curb a silent and deadly disease from further spreading.From conversations I have had with colleagues in the region through email and messenger, I realised that it took us some time to adapt to this new emergency situation. Our Disaster Risk Preparedness programmes focused on anticipating shorter, more dramatic events such as fire, flood, and civil strife. The shift from physical programmes to digital ones was difficult for many of us who did not consider the online format as effective as those public programmes we present in our galleries and activity centres.This article attempts to give an overview of Southeast Asian museum managers’ perspectives from conversations I had with them between March 2020 and October 2021, when most Southeast Asian museums were opening tentatively. Bearing in mind the impacts on our staff, we discussed how the pandemic might determine how we run our facilities and organisations, and the potential relevance of this perspective on an international scale.

Unity in a Time of Uncertainty: Ithra’s Approach During the Pandemic in Saudi Arabia

One landmark of the Saudi cultural scene in the time of Covid-19 has been the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (also known as Ithra), a recently opened Saudi cultural institution that features museums, a library, a cinema, a theatre, a children’s museum and more. Ithra’s mission is ‘to make a tangible and positive impact on human development by inspiring a passion for knowledge, creativity and cross-cultural engagement for the future of the kingdom’. It is particularly unusual insofar as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has historically counted few museums and has an underdeveloped cultural ecosystem. The nation has been undergoing an intentional transformation with Vision 2030. The programme includes vast investment in the cultural and creative sector, advancement of the quality of life and the development of cultural and creative industries (CCI).This article aims to map and understand the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on Ithra’s institutional presence and programming. It argues that the challenges of the pandemic – which are expected to lead to the permanent closure of more than 15 per cent of the world’s museums – became an opportunity to expand Ithra’s efforts to widen its relationships with audiences, communities, creative professionals and institutional stakeholders. Saudi Arabia’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic has placed it at the highest ranks on international indexes in 2021. This article will present three different initiatives that showcase the tactics of the institution during and post-lockdown, highlighting key achievements.When Ithra opened to the public in 2018, there was no pre-existing audience for cultural offerings. Ithra had to create and engage audiences, position itself as an active member of the different communities and raise awareness related to culture and creativity in the whole region. Its focus on outreach and its diverse offerings have been essential components of Ithra’s existence. In some cases, Ithra has found more success than its established international peers that exist in mature CCI ecosystems. During lockdown, instead of curtailing its offerings, Ithra increased them, greatly expanding by capitalising on its already robust digital and virtual platforms.

Thinking Phygital: A Museological Framework of Predictive Futures

The Covid-19 pandemic has underpinned the relevance and significance of the strategic use of digital tools for museums as they were unexpectedly obliged to function from behind physically closed doors. Indeed, it is fair to state that museums have come to recognise the relevance and significance of the digital to a far greater degree than they did prior to the pandemic, and museums have also acknowledged an opportunity to experiment and engage with audiences through the strategic use of digital tools. With the return of physical museum audiences (albeit in fits and starts), museums might consider this to mean that digital tools are now less relevant, rather than identifying opportunities to strike a measure of equilibrium between the digital and physical going forward. Acknowledging what has been achieved so far is certainly one point of departure, although it provides only a limited view of the broad range of possibilities that museums might have to choose from in the future.This paper explores the possible spectrum of museum experiences within the remit of the ‘phygital’, and how the physical and the digital can potentially interact to define a museum experience through the lens of museum theory. The possible ‘phygital’ scenarios, ranging from what we will term ‘sustained physical’ to ‘autonomous digital’ shall be identified through the lens of a futures literacy methodology. Such a methodology allows us to rigorously anticipate possible future scenarios and is accompanied by a series of case studies that are also representative of such scenarios. Finally, the paper anticipates possible scenarios for the phygital in terms of museums’ goals, objectives and available resources.

Articulating a Museum from Absence: Emptiness in the Conflictorium beyond Pandemic Times

In this paper, we examine how the Conflictorium – Museum of Conflict in Ahmedabad, India, grapples with the complex and interrelated phenomena of emptiness and absence. We explore how emptiness at once appears, disappears, and reappears in museum spaces, and how activist curatorial choices around exhibition-making and community engagement intermingle with subtly enforced prohibitions (i.e., orchestrated or planned absences) from state actors. Accordingly, we discuss emptiness as both a spatial and discursive challenge, which mobilises tensions around what a museum ‘is’, what takes place in museums and who undertakes such actions.While we take note of the unprecedented phenomenon of emptiness in museums around the globe due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we nevertheless argue that emptiness has always existed in both traditional, larger-scale museums and in alternative (e.g., community-organized, self-funded, temporary or smaller) institutions. Emptiness can be perceived in various ways, but often manifests in privileging some narratives over others, excluding certain voices, bodies, and stories while granting others ample space on pedestals and exhibition walls.Forging a critical engagement with existing museum definitions, the Conflictorium considers a museum to be ‘nothing’ more than what its artists, curators and diverse audiences make of it – thus placing emptiness, as one manifestation of more structural absence, at its core. In accordance with this ‘negative’ approach to museums, we interweave political theories of conflict and antagonism (Landau et al. 2021;Marchart 2018) with critical museum studies’ accounts on the ‘radical democratic’ (Sternfeld 2018) and ‘activist’ museum (Janes and Sandell 2019) to conceptualise how emptiness can operate as a crucial component of (un)making museums as places for activism. In conclusion, the paper offers a conceptual discussion of activist museums’ political engagement with emptiness beyond pandemic survival strategies.

The Covid-19 Pandemic and the Inescapable Challenge of the Anthropocene for Museums

Several indicators suggest that the Covid-19 pandemic has raised public awareness around climate and environmental emergencies, and expanded global consciousness around the interdependencies of natural systems and their individual components. These trends add up to a growing awareness of both environmental damage and social injustices, brought to wide global attention by the 2019 Climate Strikes and the ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests of 2020. How can museums take advantage of this new social and activist climate, as we resurface form the severe limitations imposed by pandemic-related health and safety measures? The concept of the Anthropocene stands out as the most powerful, all-inclusive topic that museums can leverage to reshape their relationship with a new form of citizenship during and following the Covid-19 crisis. In this article, and drawing on my work and experiences at the MUSE – Science Museum in Italy, I will offer some discussion around the urgent need, for the entire museum community, to review museum polices and activities in light of the Anthropocene paradigm, a process that museums must undertake thorough a complex process of internal strategic change. One key issue with pervasive consequences over several museum activities is the need to shift our storytelling from the humanity-against-nature narrative (a 20th-century environmentalist view) to a humanities-against-(other)-humanities narrative, which more properly describes the current Anthropocene-era conflict between different values and ethical principles with regard to the ontological status of our planet. Moreover and above all, museums need to become increasingly aware of their political role in society, and be prepared to assert it more than is customary in our practices. If the commitment to the United Nations 2030 Agenda honours the institutional task of museums, the proposal for critical debate on Anthropocene issues stands out as the main challenge for museums who wish to fulfil their social and political roles in a post-Covid-19 world.

Managing an Exhibition Project in the Midst of the Covid-19-Pandemic: A Case Study in Berlin, Germany

This paper focuses on the experience of managing an exhibition project, undertaken by young professionals from the Museums of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin during the Covid-19 pandemic. The exhibition Status. Power. Movement was on display at the Berlin Cultural Forum (Kulturforum) from September 2020 to February 2021. In this interdisciplinary project, 13 co-curators selected 130 objects from 14 collections and asked how status is represented in movement. This article provides insight into how we experienced and dealt with the creation of our first exhibition amid an unprecedented crisis.Our project was confronted with the reality of the unfolding pandemic and empty museums. Key questions and concerns arose, such as: can the exhibition be opened? How to manage the planning uncertainty and, furthermore, how to deal with this ubiquitous event in our exhibition? As a result of the considerable restrictions, communication processes within the team and collaboration with external partners became extremely difficult.Our contribution adds a critical perspective from young professionals to the now-familiar discourse around museum work during a pandemic. In it, we share solutions we developed during the crisis, such as a Covid-19 themed intervention and the development of an online format for the exhibition. We additionally aim to show how we adapted our communication processes amid the crisis, working within a large cultural institution with multiple structural layers. Drawing on our experiences, we discuss issues of museum risk and crisis management. We also underline the need for a new critical discourse that would enable professionals to share experiences, responses and solutions to the ongoing pandemic and future crisis situations.

Copyright Management in Museums: Expediency or Necessity?

Although the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and the temporary closure of cultural institutions is not propitious, there are some opportunities for museums. In fact, the crisis may represent an incentive for change. One of the crucial issues in this crisis is the matter of copyright management in museum collections. Copyright is a valuable asset for organisations, on which the possibility of using artworks depends: without the regulated legal status of the work’s authorship, it is not possible to use the work’s copy and share it via electronic media, for example. Today’s crisis is an opportunity to shift perspectives and propose or even enforce new, more strategic solutions instead of mere short-term stopgaps.The aim of this paper is to answer the following questions: Is implementing copyright-management strategies a temporary need or a necessity? I do not wish to advocate for copyright reform but instead to examine what actions we need to take to formulate and implement copyright-management strategies. This topic will be discussed by drawing on the case study of the Polish History Museum to better explain the phenomenon in question (Stake 1995). The Polish History Museum is creating its first permanent exhibition, and it is the first institution in Poland to develop a copyright-management strategy for its collections. Having analysed interviews as well as secondary sources, I will answer additional questions. What were the stages in the open-policy formulation process? What procedures and organisational changes have been introduced in the museum? What are the current benefits and dangers of implementing copyright-management strategies? I will also discuss legal issues to provide a better understanding of copyright’s potential as a valuable and immaterial resource of museums. Although the analysed case is Polish, it presents examples of implementing copyright-management strategies that may inspire other museums, including those based abroad.

From an Onsite to an Online Experience: The Case of the Museo Gabriela Mistral de Vicuña

The Museo Gabriela Mistral, dedicated to the only Latin American woman to have yet won the Nobel Prize for Literature, is part of the state network of museums in Chile. It is located in Vicuña, in the Elqui Valley. Prior to the pandemic, it received 140,000 visitors annually, mostly women and elderly Chileans, according to data provided by audience studies.Located in the poet's birthplace, its different spaces explore the memory and the personal and collective remembrance of Mistral, allowing each visitor’s individual ideas about her to emerge and vividly manifest throughout the exhibition and the property. This leads us to affirm that memory is present as a structural part of this museum, since memory requires a physical place with which to form historical and emotional connections.When the Covid-19 related lockdown began on 16 March 2020 in Chile, the museum was forced to migrate its successful onsite experiences to online counterparts. It had to divert its focus to a digital community that was unknown and little-explored up to that point, since the museum had prioritised the onsite experience. 16 months into the pandemic, including nine months of closure for the museum followed by partial and sporadic openings – as well as 70,000 social media engagements in March 2021 alone – it is worth asking: is the museum effectively closed? Moreover, who makes up the online community interested in Gabriela Mistral? This article explores these questions, including through the lens of the museum’s limited technical capabilities and available budget.

The Future of Blockbuster Exhibitions After the Covid-19 Crisis: The Case of the Dutch Museum Sector

This article deals with the long-known vulnerability of the blockbuster exhibition business model, which is defined as an exhibition that receives major loans, aims to attract a large body of visitors and uses marketing methods to achieve this. In light of the current Covid-19 crisis, which resulted in the closure of museums, blockbusters have become especially problematic. This article addresses to what extent – and for which types of museums – it will continue to be feasible to organise blockbusters in a post-Covid era. In research conducted on behalf of the Dutch Museum Association in 2020–2021, interviews with representatives of 14 Dutch museums were held, in addition to desk research. This research focused on the impact of the crisis on blockbusters and related phenomena such as scheduling and financial struggles, improvement of online platforms and the system of governmental support. Based on the data, conclusions were drawn regarding the viability of future blockbusters in different types of museums in the Netherlands.The article demonstrates that the crisis had potential to serve as a catalyst for changes that were already well underway. The constant growth that has taken place in the museum sector in the past few years appears to not be sustainable, especially if museums continue to compete for visitor numbers while overlooking the visitor experience. In this light, the Covid-19 crisis might serve to facilitate positive transformation, which could in turn enforce the speed of a much-needed shift in the museum sector;nonetheless, the results of this research show otherwise.

Distant but United: A Cooperation Charter between Ecomuseums of Italy and Brazil

In 2020, Brazil and Italy were among the countries most adversely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. The situation highlighted latent structural crises at social and economic levels and prompted widespread concern for the future. Operating in this context, ecomuseums and community museums continued their mission of caring for and interpreting living cultural heritage, empowering communities to sustainably manage heritage and thus contributing to integral local development and the strengthening of a shared social consciousness and identity. Measures aiming at the containment of the pandemic led ecomuseums to explore new methods of public engagement, inspiration and support in a bid to meet local community needs.The Brazilian Association of Ecomuseums and Community Museums (ABREMC) and the Italian Ecomuseums Network (EMI) discussed and approved the cooperation charter ‘Distant but United. The Ecomuseums and Community Museums of Italy and Brazil’ over the course of several meetings, reflecting on the responsibilities of museums in a period of crisis. The charter identifies the 10-year commitments of the signatories for the implementation of an articulated cooperation programme, as well as defining an annual calendar of promoted actions. It lays out agreed themes and strategic lines (Exchanging, Welcoming, Publishing, Training, Inviting, Organising, Communicating, and Monitoring), as well as implementation times and actions to be carried out with the involvement of actors from both sides.The charter stresses the role of ecomuseums and community museums in the promotion of both museum practices and a transition towards the creation of resilient communities, supporting them towards the goal of renewing themselves and facing contemporary crises in effective and sustainable ways. This article presents the main themes and objectives of the charter and proposes a theoretical model for understanding how bolstering communities and their ‘social imaginaries’ is crucial to fostering the integral development of communities and social innovation. It first discusses the changes necessary to overcome contemporary crises by drawing on some important theoretical models;before turning to examine how ecomuseums of Italy and Brazil responded to limitations imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic. It next presents a few ecomuseum practices developed during the pandemic, illustrates the methodology and contents of the charter and, finally, presents the main results, limitations and development prospects of the cooperation experience.

Pandemic, Protests and Building Back: 20 Months at the British Museum

This article is a personal reflection that examines the impact of the pandemic on the British Museum’s (BM) onsite interpretation and audiences;however, it is informed by robust visitor insight and evaluation as well as by direct experience. Quotes from the public are incorporated throughout. Covid-19 led to the BM’s closure on 18 March 2020, the first of several national lockdowns in the United Kingdom. The museum eventually reopened some of its galleries on 27 August 2020 with a carefully curated one-way route, primarily on the ground-floor initially.George Floyd’s death was another pivotal moment in 2020. In response, the BM’s Director issued a statement in support of Black Lives Matter (BLM). This was welcomed by staff and volunteers, but it also attracted some critical comments on social media, including calls for the return of looted African objects within the BM’s collection. The museum made some modest but significant changes ahead of reopening, introducing a Collecting and Empire trail along the one-way route and redisplaying a bust of the Museum’s founder Sir Hans Sloane to acknowledge his links to slavery and empire.The museum’s income-generating exhibition programme was much impacted by the pandemic, with planned shows Tantra: enlightenment to revolution and Arctic: culture and climate opening much later than intended, with significantly reduced visitor capacity and major adaptations. Another lockdown in December meant that the runs of both exhibitions were curtailed, with that for Arctic being drastically shortened. A significant shift to online events and resources, however, enabled these exhibitions to reach new, global audiences.The BM again re-opened on 17 May 2021, with the government subsequently lifting Covid restrictions in England on 19 July 2021. However, the pandemic has radically changed the BM’s visitor numbers and typical audience profile by massively reducing the number of international visitors. The events of 2020-21 remind us of how interconnected our world is and how quickly what happens elsewhere affects us all. The challenges for museums have rarely been greater, but there are also opportunities for institutions to rethink their relationships with audiences and the wider public.

Working to Create Value: Spanish Museums and the Challenge of Connecting with Generation Z

The Covid-19 pandemic has temporarily emptied museums and drawn attention to an aspect of these cultural institutions that is often seen as secondary and subordinate to their physical presence: the digital dimension. Having been forced to close their doors, museums have sought to boost their online activity through a range of different initiatives. The most notable actions undertaken in terms of frequency are related to social networks. This situation obliges us to ask the question: have museums succeeded in achieving a meaningful online presence in their communities via social media?In terms of marketing and digital communication, content is understood as meaningful when it provides value to the audience. This value arises from the alignment of the objectives of the institution with those of the target audience;this makes it essential to understand the profile of users who comprise the communities of different digital channels.Drawing on a comparative analysis of the profiles of museum visitors and those of social media users, this paper addresses the challenges of connecting on social media with the generation known as Generation Z (a population currently between 14 and 24 years of age). To do so, it attempts to define this generation and determine how it uses social media, taking advantage of the work already carried out by Spanish museums on their social media profiles during lockdown to establish how museum institutions can make themselves more relevant to this demographic segment in Spain and beyond.

An Abrupt and Brutal Audit: An Analysis of the Crisis Management Response of UK Museums and Heritage Attractions to the Covid-19 Pandemic

In March 2020, museums and heritage sites faced indefinite closure as the United Kingdom government sought to curb the spread of a new virus. Covid-19 brought a new kind of crisis to the heritage sector, but it also brought a learning opportunity. This article outlines a research project, conducted at the height of the pandemic, which sought to assess the museum and heritage sector crisis management response to Covid-19.In the summer of 2020, ten interviews were conducted with managers working in UK museum and heritage sites. In addition, contemporary literature relating to the impact of Covid-19 on the sector was reviewed. Three key themes were identified and explored:Experience and planning;Impact on staff;Coordination and collaborationThe study highlighted a range of lessons learned. Firstly, it showed that in the main, the sector was not prepared to deal with a pandemic of this nature. Secondly, it showed that the emotional impact on staff was profound;but also that there were increased efforts to support wellbeing. Thirdly, the research showed that there was a lack of clear information from official channels, and that this impacted decisionmaking at a site level. However, it has also revealed evidence that in the absence of official guidance, sector collaboration was significant and viewed by participants as a key positive outcome of the crisis.The article concludes with recommendations to improve crisis management in the future and offers practical resources as a starting point for greater sector preparedness.