The Digital Crunch of COVID-19: The Results of a Small Museum Producing Digital Content for a Potential New Digital Audience

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Remote Archaeology: Taking Archaeology Online in the Wake of COVID-19" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In response to the 2020 COVID-19 global pandemic, Jefferson Patterson Park and Museum in Southern Maryland saw a dramatic shift towards digital content creation as a method of engaging the public. This shift was a dramatic one for small museums like ours- that hold educational programs, in-person tours and host evening and weekend workshops. Given the social distancing guidelines and restrictions due to the COVID pandemic we created a committee to develop digital content at a rapid pace to retain public engagement. As we developed content to fill a 6-week period, we found varying results of actual audience engagement through digital content publishing on our under-utilized Facebook and Instagram social media platforms. In this paper I will be discussing the results of our collective push to engage our current and broadening digital audiences as the pandemic self-quarantined the public we would otherwise engage with face-to-face.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Remote Archaeology: Taking Archaeology Online in the Wake of COVID-19   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2021

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology