Photo courtesy Virginia Museum of History & Culture
The sudden closure of local museums caught many directors and administrators off guard — some institutions are still trying to figure out how to best represent their offerings and message online. But that isn’t the case at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture. Two days after the building closed to the public, the museum began offering robust online content for a now-captive audience.
“I think that we have probably put together in short order one of the most robust online presences of almost any museum in Virginia,” says Jamie Bosket, president and CEO of VMHC. “I don’t think any of us could have imagined to the extent that we would be where we are today. But we had a huge advantage, which is that we were an early forerunner in distance learning.”
Distance learning refers to education a student receives away from the normal classroom — a situation all students are now facing with schools being closed.
“So, even leading up to the point in which our building closed, we already had pipelines, trusted relationships and all the technology we needed to be able to broadcast,” says Bosket from his home office. “We also had spent a long time developing archives of online content. We just never knew it would be so useful as it is now. ... The effort for us wasn’t so much to create new content or to think about how to do it, it was really packaging it and promoting it.”
Some of VMHC’s free content includes live lectures — a talk from author Marcus Nevius on his book “Freedom and Unfreedom in the Early Republic’s Great Dismal Swamp” is set for June 4 at noon. There’s also an archive of lectures on the site, with more than 250 hours of authors and historians speaking on a variety of topics. Last month, a class on the history of brewing in Richmond was offered.
Bosket says the response to the museum’s online pivot has been strong.
Views of the site’s videos have doubled since they have added the new content, according to Emily Lucier, manager of public relations and marketing. Most of the live broadcasts, which can accommodate 100 devices, have been fully subscribed, Bosket says.
“I think that we’ve realized that we are uniquely positioned to do something really well,” he says. “So this now becomes an interesting new dynamic we wouldn’t have thought would be at the top of the list, but it is and ... we absolutely are interested in keeping that momentum going, even after we’re able to welcome people back to the building.”