The Lockdown Opened Museums Up for Us

This paper started with a tweet responding to social media output by Oxfordshire Museums Service (OMS) and other organisations during the pandemic. Rachel Ephgrave tweeted ‘…..It is disability not lockdown that keeps me away from museums. I hope you and others keep up these initiatives once lockdown is over. I am sure there must be many benefitting from the increased access that lockdown has paradoxically provided!’
This paper is a case study on how, during lockdowns, the OMS opened its ‘doors’ to new and existing audiences using social media. The new audience we will focus on are those of us who have conditions such as ME/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Long Covid, conditions where no matter what fixtures and fittings are incorporated into museum buildings to aid accessibility, they still do not enable people to access collections.
We will describe the digital archaeological output of OMS, with examples and will describe the impact such engagement had on this new audience during the pandemic, what is hoped for the future and why we shouldn’t always think of just the ‘footfall’ into our museums but our ‘digital-footfall’ as well.
This is a collaborative paper between OMS, delivered by Angie Bolton, Curator of Archaeology, Linda Hending and Rachel Ephgrave, both of whom had ME/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which has a significant impact on how they lead their lives and, in relation to this
paper, access archaeology