We're through our first week of being open again! Visitation wise - numbers & audience make up seem pretty normal for a rainy week in May. It was a positive week, although only about 75% of visitors read or follow instructions and that makes being front of house pretty stressful

We started with signage and a taped line, then added the stanchions, & then we found we had to add the side barrier to completely enclose the space because some people would still go physically around the end stanchion so they could lean up against the counter!

another reflection on the week - a museum visit is something to enjoy, it isn't a supermarket, people wanted to linger & have a social experience. Many had chosen us for their first time out of their house. People want to chat a lot more than usual with staff and other people

It's also been great to see that most visitors seem to be conscious of minimising touching in the galleries and shop. We've emptied water vessels, turned off touchscreens etc... but we are relieved to feel we can focus our cleaning on high-use surfaces and not showcase glass etc

Of everyone in the team our Educators have been most impacted & they are doing an awesome job planning & adapting through uncertainty. We have unexpectedly had lots of interest in resuming onsite school visits & we are now open for bookings at Level 2! https://tairawhitimuseum.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Covid-19-Level-2-Museum-Visits.pdf

We have 3 Educators (2FTE) & expected to focus on digital/virtual programmes through Term 2 w/ support from the broader team, but being responsive to teachers' needs is really important so we had to quickly switch focus back on how we could make onsite/in person work as well

Tū te Whaihanga was our first attempt at digital labelling, & now we just have some rather expensive label stands pointing visitors to all the content hurriedly put online and are back to basics with good old printed labels. A good and rather painful lesson there...