I'm Crosby Kemper, the Director of the Institute of Museum and
Library Services, the nation's largest cultural agency. Which
is why we've been working on a National Museum survey.
We've been working on this for a long time, actually.
We've tried, made, made one or two attempts in the past and and
had some difficulties to overcome because of the
heterogeneity of the museum universe, the breadth and depth
of the museum universe, which is quite extraordinary as many of
you know, but it's necessary for us to do this.
It's important for us to do this because of the huge cultural
impact of the museum world, broadly conceived.
Art museums, science museums, science and technology centers,
history museums, history sites, aquariums, zoos, botanical
gardens, The cultural center of the United States is centered in
what we refer to as museums and there's been no good, credible,
professional level national survey of all of this cultural
activity.
And we hope our National Museum survey will be that. We hope
that it will represent, as our Public Library survey has of the
library world, the extent, the cultural impact, the economic
impact, the impact on our social lives that museums represent.
Museums and libraries together have over 2 billion visitations
a year and that makes us bigger than professional sports.
It makes us the most important public spaces in America and so
we need the incredible professional review and database
of this cultural infrastructure that that you represent and in
all its heterogeneous extensive glory, and we've been working on
this for a while. We we think we're we're finally about there,
but we need your ongoing participation to make this an
instrument of knowledge.
And as an instrument of knowledge, an instrument of
change, instrument of change based on a huge impact that you
have in our world, an impact on education, an impact on
professions and professional development for the public, for
our civic leadership, for the media, for our political
leaders, for effect on policy.
So you are a pillar of our culture, pillars plural of
course, and we want to demonstrate that to the world.
So welcome.
And I'm now going to turn it over to Laura.
Great.
Well, thank you all.
Thank you Crosby for that warm welcome.
And we are so excited to have such a broad and rich attendance
for today's webinar.
As Crosby mentioned, I'm Laura Huerta Migus.
I am the Deputy Director for the Office of Museum Services here
at IMLS and I am so happy to be emceeing this presentation of
the summary findings of our National Museum Survey pilot.
I will be joined on this call by a number of colleagues from
IMLS, including Doctor Matthew Birnbaum, the Director of our
Office of Research and Evaluation, Jake Soffronoff, who
is our Survey Statistician and project lead for the National
Museum Survey effort, as well as Helen Wechsler who is a
Supervisory Senior Program Officer here in the Office of
Museum Services.
But before we jump into the findings, I want to reiterate a
really important messagefrom Crosby's opening comments.
And that is how integral relationship with so many of you
on this call has been over the last two years to plan, launch
and implement this pilot survey project.
We were informed throughout our project by a group of 10 subject
matter experts that represent a variety of demographics of the
museum community from respected researchers and data scientists
to field based practitioners.
We also highly engaged our association partners who helped
put us in touch with many museum professionals that provided
field testing and input that informed the design of the pilot
survey.
And so many, many thanks to all of you who provided great public
service to help us launch this successful pilot.
And with that, I'm actually going to hand the screen and
presentation over to my colleague, Dr.
Matt Birnbaum to start taking us through the findings from our
pilot.
Matt.
Yeah, Thank you, Laura and Dorothy, can you move to the
next slide, please?
Thank you.
So welcome everybody.
On behalf of my colleagues, I am humbled by the opportunity to
represent the agency to present the findings here.
What you're looking at are all the pieces that went into the
survey and that we're going to summarize in the next 10
minutes.
For simplicity, perhaps oversimplifying.
In designing the survey, we were looking at three particular
pieces.
We had to develop a questionnaire.
We had to figure out who is the population of people to
participate in this survey.
And three, we needed an approach to actually administer the
survey.
So a lot of what we're going to be talking about, it's about all
of it.
It's going to be looking at these three parts to this survey
design, the questionnaire, the approach for administering the
survey and the population frame.
And we're setting it up because to be successful it's going to
be based on that design we we set together and how well we can
implement that design.
Next slide please.
Matt, my apologies, can I interrupt one piece of
housekeeping that I forgot to share with our group.
We are in webinar mode on Zoom and so the chat function is not
enabled for participants.
But you can feel free to submit questions throughout the webinar
via the Q&A function that you will see at the bottom of
your screen.
We will be monitoring that and saving time for a Q and A at the
end of the presentation.
Thank you.
Thanks Matt.
Yeah, you bet.
Thanks Laura.
You're looking here at some of the punch lines, some of the
highlights and I want to just jump quickly to that last bullet
which is to announce here.
We're about 12 months away from launching a new annual survey
that will add to the nation's federal statistical system.
And we're going to be talking about all the things that we've
achieved to get to this point.
We're 12 months away.
And what I just mentioned earlier about us putting the
design together based on the questionnaire, the approach for
administering the survey in the population of frame, how well it
succeeds.
is going to be based on a whole array of factors.
And in this case, we've tried to be as scientifically robust as
possible, but at the same time being responsive to the audience
of the wide diversity of the museum sector and thinking about
those who want to contribute an influence to a healthy sector in
this country.
Next slide please.
So in the pilot overview, if you look at the left column, when we
talk about a museum,
we want to recognize the breadth and variety of what it means to
be a museum in this country.
There are multiple disciplines, from botanical gardens to
planetariums to children's museums to art museums, all
types of museums.
All of these museums were considered and tried to be
counted on in thinking about who would be participating in the
survey altogether.
When we ran the survey in the depth of August, we had
approximately sent invitations out to 7050 and that deep part
of August when a lot of us are on vacation, are thinking about
other things,
we had a 17% response rate
who responded to the survey and answering the need and
demonstration that we can get enough to participate just from
the get go to get us to a reliable statistically valid
count of measuring what is going on with our nation's museums.
Next slide please.
The next two slides are going to be sharing you basically the
same information in different ways.
This is a visual and if we can go back several years ago when
we first started to launch this current effort of the National
Museum Survey,
we started with background research, lit reviews,
landscaping, benchmarking of who already was collecting
information about our nation's museum.
If we were to begin to do one, how can we do one?
How can we add the most value?
And so like a funnel, we went from these large issues and
trying to conceptualize what would this survey look like all
the way down to finer and finer details and homing in for the
point when we got to doing a pilot to then looking at those
who didn't respond to the pilot.
So it was a very deliberate, scientifically driven approach
using the engagement of hundreds, thousands of people
across the country's museum sector.
Next slide please.
And again, this is basically the same information you saw on the
prior slide, presented it in a slightly different, form.
I want to just highlight here that one that when we started
that lit review it started to drive what the intent and
purpose would be to make sure that any data that we had would
be meaningful, useful and in ways that could help people make
more informed decision making.
Next slide please.
Indeed engagement was the key to success.
From the very, very get go, we've been thinking of how we
can best collaborate and partner and make this statistical survey
a useful product, a tool, a process to enable those in the
museum sector to use that data to make more informed decisions,
more informed plans.
As well as investors, public and private, who also have an
interest in strengthening the capacity of our country's museum
sectors.
And to do so, engagement was key from the get go.
It started with interviews and focus groups, moved all the way
to 7 experiments that we ran with a pilot, surveys all the
different ways and then having additional communications
education, outgoing in the field as well as actively using some
very valued subject matter experts who were part of this
process and with us through the whole time.
And we also were very thankful for having the American
Institutes of a Research as one of our partners for helping
administer and drive this whole endeavour.
We particularly want to focus on that last bullet that makes it
clear of trying to reach some of the small museums and hard to
reach institutions to make sure that those their voices were
heard just as loudly as others.
Next slide please.
So in developing the questionnaire survey topics,
this was nothing that if not wasn't done by a few of us in
and around Washington DC developed.
It was instead informed by the extensive engagement with the
hundreds and thousands from the museum sector and it led to us,
developing a questionnaire that addressed what we heard were the
key essential topics that we didn't have hard evidence about
and that if they had, that evidence could make a meaningful
difference.
So you see it here on the slide.
Institutional characteristics, facilities, finances, human
resources, admissions, visitors and outreach, digital presence,
diversity, equity, inclusion, as well as for those participating
in the pilot, the experience of actually trying to complete the
questionnaire and being part of that survey.
Next slide please.
So in developing the questionnaire, we used the
preliminary research and cognitive interviews with
hundreds of museum administrators, supplemented
with the subject matter experts who were part of us, to shape
the development of that questionnaire.
In running the pilot, we didn't try to use the pilot to give
national estimates on any of these questionnaire items.
Still too early.
It instead was to really figure out how to make this survey as
most responsive, least burden, getting the most credible data
possible.
And then the things that we've learned was that a majority of
people, about 60%, had a hard time answering questions related
to the finances of their museum.
And that will be a piece for follow up research over the next
year to try to get a better handle on some of the issues of
this cultural change.
So suddenly trying to throw financial information out there
that can be used for things such as benchmarking for help, and
trying to think about what peers might be doing and ways in which
certain types of museums are investing in their resources.
For the large museums, it also turned out to be a challenge to
provide report on facilities data and frequently, maybe it
was just the complexity of their institution, maybe it was
multiple locations, maybe it was different people covering
different areas.
And so that provided a little bit of a hiccup for them.
Next slide please.
In looking at the respondents survey taking experience, that
first bullet of trying to find ways to reduce the burden, and
we did so through multiple ways in how we designed the online
survey questionnaire and that was the mode in which we
administered it.
We also found out that as much as we had expected it in terms
of implementing the pilot, it seemed that we had large success
with the majority of folks being able to finish it in under an
hour.
And that includes the time they had to gather the requested
information to answer the questions.
And that they reported back that the survey was relatively easy
to complete, and the instrument was fairly easy to navigate on
the web.
Next slide please.
But that response rate, 17% participated, therefore 83%
didn't.
And we know we did it the dead of summer, which is possibly the
time when it would be hardest for many to participate in a
survey.
But we were nonetheless finding some other issues that we will
need to work on.
We ran 7 experiments to figure out what's the best way for a
person to participate in the survey.
And it turned out that if we administered it with giving
contacting people by phone at some point to tell them to go
online and complete the survey,
that that was a very effective probe to induce people to
complete the survey, and moving forward, we know we need to do a
lot more outreach in terms of raising awareness about the
survey and the benefits and uses for individual institutions and
the museum sector as a whole.
Next slide please.
OK, uncovering the intended audience.
So one of the challenges we had about 10 years ago when we last
tried to really develop this survey was to get an estimate, a
credible estimate of who are the actual museums in the United
States.
And that was a long standing challenge.
And to break the hurdle, this time, using the expertise and
wisdom and creativity and acumen of Jake Soffronoff and some of
our colleagues at AIR.
That we really moved to the pioneer threshold of data
science, where we collected data using Crowdsource data from Yelp
and supplemented from the official museum directory.
And from that, we used a number of innovative approaches and
data science, including ChatGPT, web scraping and Amazon Turk to
take those lists into something that was credible and valid,
coming up with a current estimate of about 20,000 museums
across all the disciplines of the museum sector in the
country.
Moving ahead.
Over the next year, we'll be refining that list and working
to update it so that a year from now when we're ready to launch,
the annual survey will have a very robust, credible estimate
of the size of the museum sector in the country.
Next slide please.
And my last point is now looking ahead to the next 12 months, the
good news is the reception has been relatively positive.
The survey was quick and easy to take.
The content is going to remain largely intact.
Based on the feedback that we've gotten from the pilot, we'll be
doing some tweaking, but we've largely scoped it just about
right.
But one of our challenges will now will be trying to improve
our outreach in letting people know about the National Museum
Survey, what it means to participate in it,
and helping them ease that experience of being a partner in
this.
It'll include phone calls to museums, more conference
presentations, and us continuing to do education through
communications, both social and traditional media engagement.
I'm going to thank you all for giving me this opportunity to
present.
Laura, I'm going to turn it back over to you.
Great.
Thank you, Matt.
Thank you for that high level overview of some of the lessons
learned from this endeavor as which, as Crosby,
Matt, myself and I think you'll hear others from IMLS on the
call, is really the culmination of more than two decades worth
of efforts from IMLS to move this effort forward.
So we are so excited to have gotten through this phase of the
development and piloting of a National Museum survey.
And so now we are going to move into our Q&A section.
And so Dorothy, if I could have you maybe take down the slides
and I'll invite my colleagues Helen and Jake to come on camera
as we enter into this part of our presentation.
I will remind folks online that this is your opportunity to
start populating that Q&A function.
And as we are settling in, we have multiple questions
regarding the ability to access a recording or the slides of
this presentation.
While we will not be sharing this themselves, the recording
of this session will be posted to imls.gov as will the actual
summary report, which is going to be available on our website
at imls.gov for you to dive into these findings in a more
substantive way.
And so with that, I am going to move into some of your great
questions.
And Jake, I think that this question is for you.
We have a question from Janice Klein around creating the
population frame and how did we involve different museum
associations in developing some of that frame.
So we started the we started the population frame by looking
through every available sort of public resource that we could
find.
One of the concerns that we had was trying to make sure that it
was not duplicative, which has been, you know, an issue that
IMLS has been working through in the past.
When you grab information from one list, it may be written up
in one way and then in another list it's a different way.
And the next thing you know, you've got five different lists
with five different versions of the name for one museum.
So what we wanted was effectively a phone book as much
as we could have.
And so we started, after talking to a large number of vendors in
the private sector, talking to colleagues across the public
sector from the, you know, the, the types of resources that you
would expect, census, BLS, that kind of stuff, going back
through IRS990 forms for non profits, talking to a good 10
private vendors.
The vendor that we finally chose was Yelp, which we selected
because it serves more as a phone book.
It's very location based and that's really useful for
reaching out to the museums.
If you go into some of those other data sources you end up
with, for example, from 990 forms you might you might get a
business address that's separate from the physical address.
You also, if you go through a lot of those other resources,
you are constrained to the people who are opting in to be
in being in those resources.
So you miss a lot of the ones that aren't members of the
different associations.
So we started with national Yelp data and then did our best to
find the needles in that haystack of all of the different
disciplines, which is another sort of complicating factor, and
used all of the methods that were talked about.
We used ChatGPT to try and assign them to different
disciplines.
We used some web scraping to try and get any missing business
addresses.
We used M Turk prominently for a lot of the work that would have
been normally manual work for individuals.
Because we had a list of, even using the categories available
from Yelp, we had well over 100,000 that we started with and
had to pair that down.
We also married all of this data to data wherever we could find
it, so that included our past museum data files.
It also included the OMD, the Official Museum directory in
order to try and get as many contacts as we could.
Even through all that effort, we still had trouble reaching
everybody.
So one of the one of the main issues was finding the specific
person inside of the specific institution.
And so I'm hopeful that maybe when we reach out later this
year, everyone will take our phone calls and make sure we get
the right person as we try and reinforce that list.
We did interact some with some state museum organizations,
particularly New York, because they have a a centralized body,
the different methods of defining museums.
Ours is a very, very broad tent.
Doesn't necessarily make that the approach that's going to
ensure that everyone gets in, but it's one of the approaches
that we're going to continue to triangulate as we move forward
in solidifying the the frame that we've got.
Thank you, Jake.
And I think the other thing perhaps to mention and I'm going
to move to Helen with some of these eligibility questions is
that because this was a pilot, we were also experimenting and
sort of the most rigorous way that we might have to reach out
and sample the field and there were some pretty rigorous
experiments in that that that shaped our approaches as well
for creating the frame. Right, we included seven separate field
experiments, each had its own sample.
They were all based around different ways of contacting
institutions.
So they included pre mailers, reminder mailers, sending a pre
Mailer that includes all of the information around the survey,
sending a pre Mailer that's a a postcard and phone calls, both
pre fields and midfield to, you know, reminder emails, reminder
phone calls, rather.
We did find that phone calls were the most effective method
for driving people to take the survey and we feel, looking at
the data now that a big reason for that is the difficulty
finding the specific person inside the specific institution
as opposed to saying, for example, sending an e-mail to
info at Jake's Good Museum.
It seems like you may need to send it to Jake at Jake's Good
Museum in order to really hit the mark.
Great.
Thanks, Jake.
And I think I want to remind folks that in the pilot survey
what we were the big questions we were trying to answer Is, is
it feasible to to launch a survey and and what would those
mechanisms look like?
And so Helen, we have a number of questions in the queue here
that all revolve around what's a museum.
And so I'd love if you could share the some of the framework
that we used and again more detail will be in the report,
but just for for folks asking that question, how we approached
that concept, absolutely.
Thanks Laura.
So as Jake said, we wanted to build a great big tent.
We know our field is extremely diverse and we do, at IMLS, have
experience in having criteria that help us determine
eligibility for applying to a grant program.
So we started with those pieces which helped us put together a
series of questions that allowed people or institutions to be
screened and to move through the questionnaire.
And those involved having or using collections, being
educational, being in a facility that's owned or operated, being
open to the public, you know for a period of time every year.
So those types of questions that are probably very familiar to
anybody who's applied for a grant at IMLS
Great, thank you.
And you know, we had some questions here also about
looking at the response rate from small institutions and
rural institutions.
And Matt talked about this a bit in his summary of the findings,
but I'm wondering, Jake, if you can talk about our sampling and
the attention we were paying, you know, as we in this
experiment and how we looked at different parts of the museum
field for testing.
Sure.
So if you got four or five hours, I can talk about this,
but I'll do my best to give the high level version knowing that
I'm verbose on topics like this.
So the sampling was based around #1 discipline was the largest
sort of sorting factor.
The way that we had to go about that because that this was our
first run was to collapse a number of those different groups
into sort of larger groups.
For example, some of the types of museums that have animate
collections where they kind of grouped together, the the
history museums with the historical societies, those
kinds of groups because before the field we had never asked
everybody exactly how they would categorize themselves and their
discipline.
The survey itself gets that information from you, the
practitioner.
And so in the future we're going to have much better statistics
and ability to do that.
That'll probably also be a part of our outreach later this year
to to learn more and make sure that we're able to really draw
the kinds of statistics that everybody's going to want out of
this effort.
The segmenting was also done by geography to try and make sure
that we had everybody in their own geographic mix.
And there was, there were the seven experimental groups which
effectively were trying to look like the main sample.
And then we had the much larger main sample which is what we
compared each experimental group to.
So the response rate from the experiment Group One against the
control group, that's the main sample.
We don't want those differences to be based on, you know if
experiment Group One has a whole lot of a certain type of museum.
We don't want it to be disproportionate, which could
end up skewing the results.
And then the the big measure that we would really like to
implement and hopefully will come out of the outreach that we
do this year, we would love to have a measure of size.
We didn't have that from any of the available data sources, but
we really want to make sure that we include as many small museums
as we possibly can get a hold of and they can be a little bit of
a challenge to reach.
So I'm hoping in the future we'll be more able to make sure
that that outreach is effective after we've reached out to
everybody in the interim, very good.
You know, I think I want to move this next set of questions
moving forward into just tying up this pilot a little bit.
There are some some juicy questions in here and I'm
actually going to invite Helen or Matt or Jake to respond to
this, who'd ever whoever would like to go first.
But you know, there are questions about response data
from this pilot survey and whether that will be made
available.
And I'd love to let Matt or Jake respond to that and then talk.
And there are questions about then the intention of
availability of data for the future.
Matt's muted.
Do you want me to handle that Matt?
Sure.
So because this was a pilot we weren't able to draw the kinds
of statistics that the federal government requires you to be
able to draw to report out the data, which is one of the
downsides.
The upside is that we were able to get, I feel, all of the
process based information that we needed in order to run the
survey.
One of those things that we got is about how we want to
disseminate the data when we do run the full survey.
So when we do run the full survey, we plan on having a data
portal where respondents in particular will be able to go in
and check their data, check the data of other similar types of
institutions, go and find the particular pieces of information
that may be relevant, whether they're a museum administrator,
member of the media, member of the public, and get really solid
national statistics, regional statistics, discipline based
statistics, whichever ones you might need for your use.
In our research, we found that access to data was the number
one driver for people to participate in the survey.
And so we're really putting a very strong emphasis on that.
We're also putting an emphasis on trying to get that data out
within six months of field.
So we're trying to be timely, we're trying to be complete and
we're most of all trying to be useful so that everyone who
participates really feels buy in and that the survey that we're
running is a survey that they need in terms of response rates.
We have the number that's been published the 17% national.
We have done analysis on how that breaks out by for example
discipline.
I don't know that we're going to be doing a lot more reporting
from that on the pilot, but when we do get to national data, I
think that IMLS has a strong commitment to being as
transparent as we can and trying to provide as much as we can
within the boundaries of the federal statistical system.
So, you know, we probably won't be able to send you the
individual response from a specific museum that's not
yours, but we will be able to provide you data that's been
aggregated up to a level that protects your institution and
anyone else's institution from getting sort of outed.
Just briefly to add to what Jake said, this survey, IMLS is doing
this survey and putting the public first.
The data is going to be free and accessible.
There will be no special permissions.
We're not going to be trying to make money on this.
This is to improve the larger public well-being.
Over the next 12 months, I anticipate that we'll be doing a
lot of additional research and engaging people in different
museums at different types of museums about how to make the
data and the associated products of that data such as reports,
analytical tools, etcetera, most meaningful and useful and
actionable.
That's a that's a great point and if we do reach out, I hope
you'll participate.
So if we reach out for people to help us with our user experience
testing, we really hope that people will answer the call. And
our approach is going to be able to be much more expansive and
organic in this launch phase
than it was in this pilot phase, which was a pretty tightly
controlled experiment.
Helen, I would like to move to you because there are a number
of questions here.
We know, you and I both know, being in the Office of Museum
Services, you have been the program officer for many of
these efforts, that there are a number of existing data
collection activities in the field from the different service
organizations, consultancies, etcetera.
And we have a number of questions about where we see the
NMS fitting in that landscape.
And so I'd love for you to respond to that set of questions
please.
I think that's a great question and one that has future legs and
a real future to talk about and to think about how these
integrate.
We we looked very carefully at all the other data collection
that was going on as part of the preliminary research.
And we tried hard when we did duplicate a question or or or
ask this about the same topic to use language that people were
familiar with to structure questions in similar ways to
other data collection efforts.
And we think as we continue this effort, we'd like very much to
start, as this
material becomes, and the data becomes, accessible to everybody
to be able to meld efforts together.
So that you can focus on the kinds of things that your
discipline that you need to find out from your discipline while
we're doing some core work that will be accessible and available
for everybody.
So you know that's the that's the hope for the future.
It is the first time that all the disciplines are asked this
together.
So we can compare on the same questions.
So I think it will be very valuable and we really look
forward to collaborating with the other associations of the
other data collection efforts in the future.
Thank you.
You know, there are a number of questions about access to
different parts of both the survey pilot and then future
data sets.
I'll let everybody know that the current questionnaire is
actually available right now on the IMLS website and so you can
download, if you search on our website imls.gov for National
Museum survey,
there is a page for that survey for this effort and a link to
the actual questionnaire and definitions.
So that is already available.
I do want to move forward.
There are some future facing questions about more detailed
and topical investigations beyond our current foundational
set of questions.
And so Matt or Jake, if you'd like to speak briefly to that
'cause then I have a juicy question after they've all been
juicy, but a really juicy question after this.
Jake, I'll let you take the lead on additional questions.
So one of the things that we want to do methodologically is
make sure that the main body of the survey stays as stable as
possible so that variations in response aren't due to
variations in the instrument effectively.
So one of our ideas moving forward is that we'll probably
run what we're calling offshoot topical surveys, which will give
us a special place to put surveys that cover material that
either doesn't make sense to ask annually or material that may be
responsive to a specific situation that occurs, for
example, when the COVID outbreak took place.
We might use an offshoot topical survey, or for issues that only
affect a specific subset, so maybe a specific discipline, we
may do an offshoot topical survey.
Those are going to be, as we currently envision them, most
likely to be put out right after the survey is done to a select
sub sample of respondents so that they don't burden
everybody.
It's not a matter of, like, this year the survey is this much
longer for everyone.
It'll only be on a a smaller group and hopefully will not be
overly burdensome, but will allow us to hit those topical
issues as useful or needed kind of as we move forward while
allowing us to maintain the fidelity of the original
instrument.
Great.
And I there's some follow on questions and it it melds a
little bit with Helen's response about you know, do we think
about this effort replacing other field efforts.
I might be so bold as to maybe answer that question if I could.
I think our intention is no.
And I would actually point folks if you're not familiar with the
work that IMLS has done for more than 40 years on the Public
Library survey, the PLS, which is a very rigorous data
collection on our sibling community here at IMLS I think
you can be assured that there is still plenty of field driven
data collection in the Public Library sector, but it is driven
and accelerated by the PLS.
And Matt, you sat up straight if you wanted to share anything
about that.
Yeah, I would Now using Jake's example of COVID because we've
been collecting the Public Library survey for 40 years,
when we went to introduce two years of special topical surveys
about COVID, it was supplemented by a wealth of data going back
40 years on key core parts of public libraries, finances,
staffing, other operational issues.
That allowed us to get the real full picture of the extent of
the disruption.
We had something similar a decade earlier, 15 years earlier
when we were looking at the aftermath of the Great
Recession, particularly in how that shuffled federal and state
spending patterns for those, for those libraries.
So I would anticipate a very similar strategy here for the
museum sector and keeping those core questions that Jake talked
about so that we could be looking at things over time and
for our space.
Thank you.
So I do want to move to the juicy question that I alluded to
earlier that has come up in a couple of different ways and I
think you can, I'll offer both adjectives and you all can
respond as you are so moved.
But there were a couple of questions around what were the
most surprising or provocative findings from this experience
that we found.
I'll let you all cogitate and whoever would like to go first.
I mean one of one of the things that I felt like we needed to be
particularly responsive to and was... I don't know if it's
not... I don't know if it's surprising is necessarily the
word.
But very early was driven home to me through our research and
outreach to the field were the great differences between the
different disciplines and between the different sizes of
institutions.
Understanding in as deep a way as we can, where those
differences occur and how they affect people's responses to our
outreach was a very...
I mean it was provocative in that it really drove home how
important it was.
For example, a lot of institutions aren't going to
call themselves necessarily museums.
A Botanical Garden, if they get outreach for a National Museum
survey, may not know that we want to talk to them.
And so making sure that we do everything we can to reach those
institutions.
You know, if you look at any of our lists, they're always listed
first because we want to make sure that if somebody's perusing
the paragraph, they stick out.
So there's a lot of intentionality around size and
discipline that came out of our research that I'm sure those in
the field might know, but that we really work to be as
sensitive to as we can.
Thanks, Jake, Matt, Helen.
Yeah, it's not surprising, but I'll say challenging the finding
that financial data was a real challenge for many museums
participate that on its surface doesn't surprise me.
What I'm stuck with is still the uncertainty of what it means for
going forward to try to lower those hurdles.
Because I think that that data will be so important and
valuable for all museums to be able to use to benchmark their
own growth and development and to be able to tell collective
stories to policy makers.
And I'll add on to that because we did have a question about how
the financial data was collected and it was self-reported and we
didn't collect it from any other source but we did try to link
what we were asking for to 990 items so that if you filled out
your 990 you know where to how to answer the question.
We tried to structure it the way others might ask for financial
information so that you weren't digging up different numbers for
different surveys you're filling out.
So that is a big question that how to make it even easier or
what's how how do we get to those answers?
Because that data is super, super important.
And what, what's most surprising, I guess not
surprising, but sobering, was familiarity with IMLS, which you
know is going to be important.
We have to be that the organization that's asking for
all this information should be trusted.
And if you don't know who we are, it's hard to trust us.
So we've got some heavy lifting to do in that regard.
So that the part of the field that isn't familiar with us will
feel welcome and comfortable.
Laura, how about you?
Oh, I feel like the jaded person here as a former association
person who has mounted these data collections.
I felt like this two years was I told you so.
I see it's not just us, but I think that the opportunity, all
these challenges I think are lived experiences from folks
who've been doing this kind of data collection in the field.
And this opportunity gave us a chance to modify that as a
public serving agency and organization.
You know, we have a existential mandate to be stewards of this
kind of data at the national level.
And so I think bringing together a lot of lived experience from
museums to this work and even documenting what the challenges
are are going to be very cathartic for the field and help
us move forward together.
I also think that it's a call to some solidarity across our
differences for museums.
If we want to be able to tell, particularly a policy narrative
in times of crisis, as well as times of bounty, about our
presence and impact of this sector, there is going to need
to be some uniformity and in some basic reporting and
figures.
And hopefully the future of this effort can help provide a clear
path not to define it, but provide a common reference point
to to keep us all iterating going forward.
I will say that I am.
I was happily surprised at the overall positive feedback that
we received for the effort and the amount of engagement and
interest that there's been in a time of such a busyness and and
a crowded landscape for museum leaders and practitioners.
So I think there's a real positive, positive story moving
forward.
I am looking at our time.
I'm also checking in on our energy and I'd love to give my
colleagues a last chance.
I know that you can see Matt, I think that we answered that
question if you can.
But if you do see any other stragglers that we didn't
capture or you want to share some final thoughts as we close
out our time together.
I'd just like to give another plug.
If if you do see us looking for helpers between now and the full
survey, please participate.
And then I saw one or two questions about us presenting.
We're going to be out there and presenting. We'll be happy to
talk to people when we do that about what we've done here and
what we're doing moving forward.
The last thing I guess would be, if you haven't, I think I
answered one question in the chat itself about having not
been contacted or having not participated in the pilot.
While the pilot is over.
We do want everybody we can possibly get to participate when
we run the full survey.
And so if anybody is in a situation where you're not sure
that we have the right contact information for your
institution,
I would be thrilled if you would send emails to nms@imls.gov to
pass along that information and we'll make sure it, you know,
gets in the right place so that you get the outreach for the
full survey.
Helen, any parting thoughts?
Well, echoing Jake that our engagement with the field is not
at all over after this pilot.
We've got a lot of work to do between now and the 2025 launch.
So we're going to be knocking on doors and associations are going
to be with us, we hope and others in the field.
We really are relying on you to make it something that works for
everybody.
And Matt, any final thoughts before final housekeeping, I'll
just say that we we have an open door.
We we are here to learn and share.
So please don't hesitate to connect us.
And you can already see what a force Jake and Helen are and we
are fully confident they can answer everything and I'll
conflate it and then Laura can come and correct it.
Well, thank you for that.
I think Dorothy, we can move to our last slide which is the most
important one, which is really expressing our thanks to all of
you for joining us on this call.
As a reminder, if you want to be in touch with IMLS in general
for this effort and future efforts, you can always
subscribe to our mailing list via our website at
imls.gov/news/subscribe.
If you would like to follow up directly around the National
Museum survey with some of the more fine grained details that
Jake mentioned, you can e-mail us at N ms@imls.gov The report
that we highlighted today is actually available right now on
IML s s website.
There is a press release at the very top of our home page and
you can access that report now.
We look forward to engaging with all of you in the future to help
us ensure that our full NMS survey data collection in 2025
is a success.
And we are also going to be looking for field experts to
join us in advisory capacities.
And so again, if that is something that you are
interested in or have expertise, please do e-mail us at
nms@imls.gov In the meantime, please look for more updates
from us and solicitations.
Thank you again for your partnership and your interest
and we look forward to talking to you about the full survey
launch in 2025.
Thank you.
Thank you everybody.