In Hungary, all museums have been closed since the 16th of March. As the government published the intensifying state of emergency, each museum was closed by its responsible governing authorities (ministry, local government, municipality, church etc.). The closing of the museums mostly was announced by the directors or the local authorities themselves. Many of the colleagues started to work via the home office or special work schedule because the schools and kindergartens are also closed and have changed for digital education from that day.
The Pulszky Society – Hungarian Museum Association started to give aid to the museums. We share good practices for the home office, how to stay in touch with the audience, how to support the digital public education by museum tools. We plan to start a new platform for coronavirus affairs on our website. The museum professionals try to help the teachers, a questionnaire survey is under construction on the possible fields of museum contribution to the digital public education.
We also have a new initiative, to offer an alternative to the audience. The Hungarian version of the #MuseumFromHome, #muzeumozzaszobadbol started, and has more and more followers in social media.
The Pulszky Society – Hungarian Museum Association is committed to giving support to its members and the Hungarian museum sector. On its website, the Society launched a new menu item called ‘MÚZEUM MÁSKÉNT’ (‘Museum Alternate’ or ‘Museum As’ like the ‘Save As’ function in IT applications).
This initiation aims to collect and share useful information, give recommendations, share best practices, give aid to the museums in the state of emergency. The content is:
Recommendation for museums, how to regulate their home office employees. Downloadable documents, blank forms, information on labour legislation.
Proposals and inspirations: how to develop your digital databases and collection management systems via home office? Downloadable hand-guide for digital publishing, best practices and useful links of national and European museum aggregation platforms.
Thematic collection of digital contents and social media:
– Join our Instagram and share any museum content what calms you and helps you to tolerate these hard days.
– Download some useful books and educational content and start self-education at home! Take the advantages of your obligatory stay at home and develop your knowledge and skills!
– Visit the website and join #muzeumozzaszobadbol – a platform for digital museum contents like virtual tours, databases, browse collections etc.
– The National Museum’s Methodological and Information Centre (OMMIK) shared some Twitter initiations like #MuseumFromHome and #MuseumMomentofZen
– Best practices and recommendations for museums, how to adapt their digital solutions to the changing circumstances.
– Info and link about NEMO’s survey, the coronavirus impact on the European museum sector
– Info and link of an actual survey on “Digital education and museum contents”. The Hungarian Open-Air Museum announced a questionnaire for teachers, to investigate what kind of museum contents would be useful to support the e-teaching. In Hungary, the schools (as buildings and as public spaces) are closed, but the academic year is carried on by electronic curriculum. The schoolchildren and students learn via the internet from their homes. The teachers suddenly need a huge amount of authentic and trustworthy digital content, and not only for History or Art History but many more subjects as well. The target group of the survey are the public education professionals, teachers and school directors. We ask them to let us know their expectations, their needs, and hopefully, the museum sector will be able to give relevant answers to the needs of public education.
