Open Forum

Hello.

I was wondering if any organization had any experience with remote volunteers - or volunteers who do not volunteer on site at a museum or historic site building.

We have a grassroots volunteer corps of individuals that are all over the country to promote awareness for our Foundation and the National Museum of the United States Army, but now that the Museum is built, we are wondering if there are other ways we can utilize our remote volunteer corps beyond awareness. We also want to ensure that they are feeling as recognized and valued as other volunteer groups.

Thank you.

Hi, Kathleen! This is a great question! I suggest you think about ways your remote volunteers can help with accessibility needs. At the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, we have a group of volunteers working remotely to update the alt text on all of our website images, to make it more accessible to people using screen readers. You could also have remote volunteers work on verbal descriptions of artifacts in the museum or host virtual programming like Vivian suggested. Virtual programming lends itself to engaging populations who are medically vulnerable or have other reasons that they cannot come to your museum, and makes language interpretation easier, for signed or spoken languages, as the interpreter does not need to be on-site.  - Lana

Another transcription idea similar to what Lana suggested - if you have handwritten documents in your collections, remote volunteers can transcribe them by looking at images of the writing. We did a lot of that during COVID to transcribe field notes from collecting expeditions. 

Greetings Kathleen,

I have been volunteering for the Houston Maritime Center and Museum since 2020. (Originally the Houston Maritime Museum.)

I live 60 miles north of Houston and the traffic is a problem. While I have worked at the museum a number of times, I have devoted countless hours digitizing written materials, photos, etc. at home.

I was prompted to do this when the daughter of the museum's founder gave me six boxes of his memorabilia. I have these in my home office. My work has included, sorting ang putting the materials in archival file boxes cataloging the contents of each box, transcribing a CD on his life, interviewing several museum staff, digitizing 35mm slides, and scanning/cataloging the founder's documents. 

I recently completed my Capstone project for a MS in Maritime and Naval Studies. My subject was a biography of the founder of the Houston Maritime Museum and the history of the museum since it opened December 1, 2000. 

I am planning to publish the founder's biography.

While I am not the curator, I will be providing the digitized files identified for easy download to their Past Perfect system.