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  • June 22, 2021 8:52 AM | Anonymous

    Reposted from Artnet News

    During World War II, a group of American and British curators, art historians, librarians, architects, and artists were tasked with the daunting mission of recovering artworks looted by the Nazis in real-time. This group (which included women, it should be noted) came to be known as the Monuments Men. Their unique mission, and their daring, is most likely familiar from George Clooney’s 2014 movie of the same name. But well before and after their stories came to the silver screen a group of scholars and writers had been devoted to preserving and promoting this unique legacy, known as the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art (MMF). A best-selling book penned by MMF founder Robert M. Edsel was the basis of the movie, in fact.

    While the MMF has garnered the most attention for its continuing restitution work, the foundation has expanded the mission in a new direction with the recent launch of the Monuments Men and Women Museum Network. Rather than focusing squarely on wartime efforts, this organization of museums aims to showcase the cultural contributions of these men and women well before and after World War II, and how they were pivotal to returning works to their rightful museums as well as contributing to scholarship. Currently, twenty leading institutions in the US, UK, Germany, and New Zealand have joined the network, including the Courtauld Gallery, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and Berlin State Museums—with the list growing steadily.

    Anna Bottinelli, president of MMF, spearheaded the network. “The success of our efforts to honor the Monuments Men and Women has, until now, been focused on their wartime service,” noted Bottinelli. “The creation of the Monuments Men and Women Museum Network will, for the first time, bring much-deserved visibility to their immense contribution to museums and cultural life in the United States and elsewhere, both before and after the war.” 

    Member institutions have pledged either free and reduced admission or store discounts to those belonging to the Foundation’s membership program —and are sharing their unique connection to the Monuments Men and Women on social media. Bottinelli underscores that the coordinated effort to share each museum’s connection with the heroes of yesteryear is “part of the educational component of the Foundation’s mission” — a mission focused on restitution, education, and preservation. 

    ‘[The Foundation’s] initiative to strengthen the ties between the MMF and institutions that the Monuments Men and Women helped build into what they are today is remarkable” noted Michael Eissenhauer, director-general of the Berlin State Museums. 

    As part of the official launch of the Museum Network, the Foundation has been sharing each museum’s important ties to the “heroes of civilization” through social media campaigns, newsletters, and other channels, encouraging museums and institutions to scour their records, archives, and collections for links to the Monuments Men and Women. The Museum Network says it is likely that hundreds of works displayed in public institutions have unrealized connections to WWII —and that many former staff members participated in the recovery of looted art. 

    See Original Post

  • June 09, 2021 11:26 AM | Anonymous

    IFCPP is honored to welcome our newest member to the Foundation's esteemed Board of Advisors. Most of our members will recognize Armando Leon from the outstanding conference sessions, certification courses, and webinars that he has provided over the last couple of years. Welcome aboard Armando - we can't thank you enough for all that you do for IFCPP, and for the cultural property protection community worldwide!

    With over 20 years of Military, Law Enforcement and Security experience, Armando Leon serves as the Director of Protective Services for The Museum of the Bible. Armando oversees the overall security and protection of the Museum in Washington DC, all artifacts stored in an off-site location and any exhibits traveling worldwide.  Armando is also the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Armite International Security Solutions, a strategic advisement company in the Washington, DC Metro Area.

    Prior to this position, Armando worked at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for many years. Starting off as an Officer on the Security Contract, Armando rose through the ranks attaining the position of Assistant Project Manager, responsible for coordinating and implementing all of the Contract Security Operations for the Museum.

    Before moving to the D.C. area, Armando lived in Miami, Florida and served as a Police Officer in Miami-Dade County. Throughout his time as a Police Officer, Armando worked with several proactive units, and also patrolled some of the worst neighborhoods in the county. 

    Armando has also served, and continues to serve in the United States Army. His record includes active duty service with the 3rd Infantry Division during the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003, and he currently serves with the District of Columbia National Guard, where he holds the position of Operations NCO in a Military Police Battalion.

    Armando is a current member of the International Foundation for Cultural Property Protection (IFCPP) and ASIS International.   Armando is a Certified Institutional Protection Specialist, a Certified Institutional Protection Manager II with the IFCPP as well as a Certified Protection Professional (CPP) with ASIS International.

    Armando has an Associate Degree from Northern Virginia Community College, a Bachelor of Arts in History from George Mason University and is currently working on a Master of Business Administration from American Military University.

  • June 09, 2021 11:21 AM | Anonymous

    Reposted from The Guardian

    A year ago, Laura Pye would have said that she had been a champion of diversity throughout her career. And then George Floyd’s murder sparked a movement that took hold in the UK on an unprecedented scale.

    “I would have said that I was anti-racist before, but I never understood the scale of racism and what that looks like on a daily basis in some parts of our society until the last 12 months,” she said.

    Pye is the director of National Museums Liverpool (NML), a collection of seven museums and galleries in the city. One of those is the International Slavery Museum (ISM), which opened in 2007. As demonstrations spread last summer and the statue of the slaver Edward Colston was toppled in Bristol, the conversation in Britain turned to the lasting impact of the slave trade.

    ISM was perfectly placed to contribute. “Liverpool is absolutely a city that is built on transatlantic slavery. You see in our architecture, you see it in our street names, you see it everywhere you look,” said Pye, which meant there was a “maturity” to the discussion compared with some areas of the UK.

    ISM describes itself as a “campaigning museum” that works to end contemporary forms of slavery and is Britain’s only museum where you can officially report hate crime. According to Pye, the aims of ISM include documenting the story of Africa before slavery, “but also to talk about the legacy of transatlantic slavery for the UK – and one of those legacies is institutional racism”.

    The museum found itself deluged with press requests, and NML quickly released a statement in solidarity with black communities in Minneapolis and around the world. As in many workplaces, the focus also turned inwards. Only 5% of NML’s 600 or so employees are black, Asian or an ethnic minority. In a city with one of Britain’s oldest black communities, only 0.5% of the museum employees identify as black, African, Caribbean or Black British.

    Jennifer Abrahim, a 32-year-old administrative co-ordinator for the Museum of Liverpool, said she found the days following Floyd’s death “quite traumatic”. “People were just relentlessly sharing the footage [of the killing], so it was absolutely everywhere.”

    For Abrahim, who is half-Iraqi, the conversations had brought back memories of racism she had faced growing up in Liverpool, including being pelted with objects from a car and having Islamophobic abuse shouted at her following the 7/7 bombings.

    In the days that followed, she was due to take minutes at a regional arts meeting, where “the majority of the CEOs across the consortium are white” and knew that a response to BLM would be discussed. She recalls feeling “anxious as to how it was going to be spoken about”.

    Sahar Beyad, who is the only person of colour on NML’s PR and communications team, also struggled. She said: “It was everywhere and you just couldn’t switch off.” Falling during the height of lockdown in the UK, where people of colour had died in disproportionate numbers, Beyad found continuing with daily meetings while keeping her “emotions in check” almost unbearable.

    “A number of my colleagues, probably for the first time, saw a very emotional side to me,” she said.

    Along with others in the sector, NML reflected on the diversity of its collections and the stories it was telling through its exhibitions. The Museum of Liverpool began a project to collect objects telling the story of the city-wide BLM protests, the Walker Art Gallery pledged to become more transparent about the links between the collections and the slavery and panels were put up advertising the group’s commitment to the BLM movement. 

    “We’ve been quite good at public programming and stuff that is project-based,” said Pye, who moved back to her home city in 2018 to take up the role. But “our workforce diversity was then, and still is not, representative of the communities in which we live”.

    Pye said it was great to work to make the museums and galleries more representative, “but actually if our workforce isn’t representative, then really how diverse are we as an organisation?”

    NML established an anti-racism steering group, which included senior managers. Many of the agenda items were not new – they had had an external advisory group of community members for years, but the BLM movement gave it renewed vigour. Also invited were the BAME staff group, co-founded by Dr Richard Benjamin, ISM’s director. Fifteen years after it was established, there are fewer than 10 of them who meet regularly. One staffer said many of the employees of colour work in more insecure roles such as cleaning or catering, and feel unable to attend meetings around their shift patterns.

    The group would regularly meet to discuss workplaces issues, to “check in” with one another and “act as a sounding board” for ideas, Beyad said, or a “safe space” as Abrahim put it. As well as discussions one on one with current staff, Pye sought out former employees of colour. This was “a whole load harder, but also a whole load more useful”, said Pye.

    NML have set themselves a target of improving staff representation from ethnic minorities to 14% by 2030 – more in line with an estimate of the city’s demographics. However, “museums are the least diverse part of the cultural sector”, Pye said. A report from the Arts Council in 2019 found that 5% of staff in major museums in England were black, Asian or an ethnic minority. “It’s a sector-wide issue”, agrees Benjamin, but says there is also a lack of diversity among relevant courses within higher education.

    Another factor is attracting people of colour to apply for jobs in the first place. NML has changed its recruitment processes in an attempt to improve accessibility, including where they advertise and holding open sessions to answer questions.

    The subject matter may be off-putting as well. Pye said she had heard from ex-staffers the difficulties of dealing with subject matters such as the transatlantic slave trade “when it’s really quite raw for you as an individual, it is your heritage that you’re talking about, and you’re constantly having to … try to find a way of presenting it as we are trying to do [in the museums]”.

    Benjamin can relate. “British Guyana, and Demerara, where my dad’s from – that’s a big narrative in the museum.” 

    Benjamin says he tells staff members to “never take the human element out of it, and never try to hide or contain your emotions”, but acknowledges that he has dealt with it in his own way, describing himself as a “stoic Yorkshireman”.

    “Sometimes I maybe need to take a bit of time out because it is emotionally draining.”

    While the past 12 months have been difficult for many staff members, Beyad says she has been encouraged by the “momentum”. As a member of Museum Detox, a network for people of colour who work in museums and galleries, she says she feels “lucky” to have the support from the staff group, as well as a director who is straightforwardly determined to make change. 

    “I know there are many other organisations within the art world who haven’t had that,” she said.

    A year on, does Pye feel more or less hopeful that NML can make the necessary change? About the same, she says. She is “more realistic now. I think I understand the scale of the challenge more than I did 12 months ago.”

    See Original Post

  • June 09, 2021 11:06 AM | Anonymous

    Reposted from Artnet News

    A year ago, the outlook for U.S. museums appeared grim: a July 2020 survey conducted by the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) found that one-third of institutions across the country could close due to the devastating effects of the pandemic. 

    But now, things may be starting to look up. A new report by AAM—the professional organization’s third such survey since March of 2020—suggests that 15 percent of museums are at risk of closure. That’s an improved number to be sure, but a sobering one, too. 

    Indeed, if there’s a message to take away from the survey, it’s that museums’ prospects are better, but still bleak. 

    “The museum field will take years to recover to pre-pandemic levels of staffing, revenue, and community engagement,” said Laura Lott, AAM’s president and CEO, in a statement. 

    More than 1,000 museum directors were surveyed for the report, which was conducted in April and released this week. More than three-quarters of them noted that their operating income dropped by an average of 40 percent. 

    Twenty-two percent of museums had to lay off full-time staff; 28 percent had to cut part-time employees. Just 44 percent of institutions went through the pandemic without furloughing anyone. 

    Worryingly, nearly 60 percent of museums were forced to cut back on education, programming, and other public services.

    On average, museums were closed for 28 weeks because of the health crisis. Of course, that number isn’t static, either: 29 percent of respondents have yet to reopen. Those that have are expecting visitor numbers to come in at just 41 percent of pre-pandemic figures. (AAM’s fall survey, released in November 2020, found similar numbers.) 

    Focussing on the positive, Lott pointed to the contributions museums made during a turbulent time. 

    “Despite economic distress, museums have been filling critical gaps in our communities,” she said. “During the pandemic, museum professionals—severely impacted by the pandemic themselves—stepped up by serving the needs of their communities by supporting an education system in crisis; donating PPE and addressing food insecurity; and providing reliable information on COVID-19 and vaccinations.” (Lott elaborated on museums’ ability to help public schools in an October 2020 Artnet News op-ed.)

    Read AAM’s full National Snapshot of COVID-19 Impact on United States Museums survey here.

    See Original Post

  • June 09, 2021 6:23 AM | Anonymous

    Reposted from Artnet News

    In New York, Memorial Day weekend concluded the month of May with three rather cold, rainy days—and yet that didn’t stop museum goers, buoyed by relaxed health restrictions and pent-up social energy, from getting out and seeing art, apparently.

    Visitors flocked to many of New York’s major museums last weekend in numbers not seen since before the onset of the pandemic. Some even posted attendance figures in line with those of previous years. 

    If there was concern among these institutions about the city’s appetite to return after months of restrictions, the holiday surely brought some hope. “This was by far the highest weekend attendance that we’ve seen since our August 2020 reopening,” a representative from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) said, noting that the institution, now operating at full capacity, saw 9,000 visitors on Saturday and Sunday. That figure is actually higher than what MoMA registered on Memorial Day 2019.

    For its part, the Metropolitan Museum of Art welcomed more than 10,000 visitors on each of the holiday weekend’s three days, a spokesperson told Artnet News. Those are the highest numbers the institution has logged since the lockdown in March 2020, and roughly double that of those just two months ago. 

    “With the visitor and security teams stepping up to meet the increased demand,” the spokesperson said, “great joy was had by our visitors on a very rainy weekend.” 

    The Met is currently operating at half capacity, but due to the size of the museum, that doesn’t actually have a significant impact on ticket numbers, the rep explained. Still, these tallies represent just half of what the institution—one of the city’s biggest tourist destinations—would pull in before the crisis. 

    Last month, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that, starting May 19, museums, among other venues, could once again operate at full capacity, so long as visitors had space to maintain social-distancing protocols. Few institutions in the city have embraced the opportunity as fully as MoMA—yet attendance milestones were nevertheless commonplace over the weekend.

    The Whitney Museum (operating at 50 percent capacity) brought in 9,000 guests, which was among its highest weekend totals in the pandemic, a representative said. Meanwhile, ticket sales at the Jewish Museum (at 35 percent capacity) were double what they were weeks ago. “With the strong showing for the museum over Memorial Day weekend, and as more people are vaccinated and feel comfortable visiting museums again, we are hopeful attendance will continue to increase,” a representative for the museum said in a statement.

    Over the weekend, the New Museum also scored its highest two-day attendance total since reopening in September 2020. Notably, the institution’s “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America” exhibition, curated by the late Okwui Enwezor, has regularly garnered figures that rival “pre-pandemic attendance levels” since opening in February, a spokesperson said—and that’s with the site operating at an unspecified “reduced” capacity. “The [museum] has been humbled by the response.”

    Good vibes aside, these blue-chip institutions in New York are of course not representative of the larger landscape of American museums, especially on the issue of visitorship. A survey released this week by the American Alliance of Museums found that, on average, venues are registering just 41 percent of pre-pandemic attendance numbers. Nearly one-third of museums across the country have yet to reopen at all.

    See Original Post

  • June 09, 2021 6:08 AM | Anonymous

    Reposted from The New York Times

    The Smithsonian Institution, which reopened eight of its Washington-area institutions this month, on Wednesday announced a schedule to bring back the rest of its museums closed by the pandemic — including two in New York — by the end of August.

    The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York will open on June 10. Admission will be free through Oct. 31, but tickets must be reserved online in advance.

    Willi Smith: Street Couture,” which opened briefly before the museum was shuttered by the pandemic, will be extended through Oct. 24. “Contemporary Muslim Fashions,” organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, will be on view through July 11.

    The National Museum of Natural History in Washington will open its doors on June 18, followed by the Smithsonian’s other New York City location, the National Museum of the American Indian, on June 23.

    July will bring four more Washington reopenings: The National Museum of African Art and the Freer Gallery of Art on July 16, followed by the National Air and Space Museum and the Smithsonian Institution Building, known as the Castle, on July 30. (The Sackler Gallery of Art, which shares a building with the Freer Gallery, will be closed until November because of exhibition construction.)

    The final batch, in August, includes the Anacostia Community Museum on Aug. 6, the Hirshhorn Museum on Aug. 20 and the National Postal Museum on Aug. 27.

    The Smithsonian also announced a grand reopening in November of the Arts and Industries Building, which has been closed to the public since 2004. A new free exhibition, “FUTURES,” will celebrate the Smithsonian’s 175th anniversary by showcasing nearly 150 objects, including an experimental Alexander Graham Bell telephone, a Covid-friendly support robot that reduces loneliness and a video game that can be played using the eyes. It will be on view through July 2022.

    Visitors will need to reserve free timed entry passes online for most locations, which will be available beginning a week before an institution’s scheduled reopening. A Smithsonian spokeswoman said capacity will vary, but will start around 25 percent, and then increase when the Smithsonian believes it can safely accommodate more visitors.

    Additional precautions will also be in place: The museums will require facial coverings for everyone ages 2 and older, though fully vaccinated visitors will not be required to wear them in outdoor spaces. Some sites will reduce their hours, and some museum cafes and retail stores may  be closed.

    The Smithsonian had reopened eight of its Washington-area museums between July and October of last year, but it was forced to close them again at the end of November when coronavirus cases increased across the country. The Institution’s other museums have all been closed since March 2020.

    New York and Washington both began allowing museums to operate at full capacity last week, though a six-foot social distancing requirement remains in place.

    See Original Post

  • June 09, 2021 6:05 AM | Anonymous

    Reposted from The Art Newspaper

    Fewer art and cultural heritage works were stolen in Italy in 2020 compared with the previous year, according to the annual report of the Carabinieri TPC, the country’s police force dedicated to recovering stolen art. The drop was partly caused by the pandemic, which also forced dealers in stolen art online, but is part of a longer-term downward trend driven by increasingly high-tech security and surveillance technology, General Roberto Riccardi, the head of the unit, tells The Art Newspaper

    The report reveals that 287 works were stolen in 2020, down from 345 in 2019 and 474 in 2018. Meanwhile, the Carabinieri recovered 501,574 items worth an estimated €333.6m in 2020 (including 1,085 paintings and 7,460 sculptures), compared with 902,804 items worth €103.5m in 2019 (including 796 paintings and just 146 sculptures) in 2019. The force recovered 12,181 items in online searches in 2020, up from 8,732 in 2019.

    “The impact of Covid-19 [on the figures] cannot be excluded. Places of worship, museums, galleries and libraries were all closed for long periods, thus reducing opportunities for thieves to steal works,” Riccardi says. With markets such as antiques shops and auction houses closed, the Carabinieri ramped up online searches. “Stolen work turned up in digital auction catalogues as well as on websites and Facebook pages. Dealers were often unaware that they were handling stolen works,” he says.

    Searches via the Carabinieri’s electronic catalogue of 1.3 million stolen goods, which is the oldest and largest such database in the world, will soon be enhanced with an automated system that will scour the internet for matching works. The pilot programme, which is being developed with a €5m grant from the EU and will be made available to Interpol, should be operational by the end of next year. In another pilot scheme, the Carabinieri are collaborating with the Pompeii Archaeological Park to develop a state-of-the-art drone-based surveillance system, which will be a model for other similar sites.

    Using satellite images and footage taken from helicopters and drones, the Carabinieri completed an investigation of looters operating in an Ancient Greek archaeological site in Calabria; the investigation led to 23 arrests and the recovery of 104 items in several countries.

    See Original Post

  • June 09, 2021 6:01 AM | Anonymous

    Reposted from Security Management

    Connected physical security equipment, like networked surveillance cameras and smart access control systems, offer many advantages for facility and safety managers responsible for securing the premises of retail, industrial, government, and other organizations. Integrated IP-video recording systems with cloud-based recording and administration features are popular among users with little time to purchase and integrate different camera, cabling, and video storage hardware.

    Research on this physical security slice of the Internet of Things (IoT) device market and real world events, however, show adoption of these systems introduces complex cyber risk issues.

    In 2020, our Forescout Research Labs team set out to identify the top 10 riskiest IoT devices as part of an exhaustive study analyzing 8 million devices across more than 500 enterprise deployments. We looked at factors like the frequency and severity of vulnerabilities discovered in these platforms and unique risks posed by where and how they are typically installed. Physical access control systems were the riskiest class of devices. Building HVAC systems came in second, and connected camera systems came in third. The fact that in-demand physical security and camera systems claimed two of the top three categories shows the scale and stakes of cyber risk management around these systems.

    These risks must be assessed and handled jointly, typically by otherwise very different teams focused on the safety of employees and facilities versus the security of corporate networks and data. Here are a few crucial principles to bear in mind.

    Who Will Own the Devices—and Their Attack Surface?

    Physical and cybersecurity professionals need to collaborate more than ever because they are both accustomed to the relentless change and consequences of risks to business operations, particularly more than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Connected cameras are a great example of where these worlds collide. A facility manager might have the authority to evaluate, purchase, and deploy cameras—working almost exclusively with the camera vendor to take delivery of the devices, install them via Wi-Fi on the network, and set-up credentials to remotely administer the system’s footage and recordings.

    While this sounds like an isolated project, in reality each of those cameras add new computing devices to the network with their own operating system, IP stack, and other software features. Any of these can contain vulnerabilities or otherwise expand the total digital attack surface falling under cybersecurity teams’ responsibility.

    A well-managed deployment is a secure deployment, so establish up-front who is responsible for data and imagery these devices gather, versus their security footprint. In practice, this means physical and cybersecurity teams identifying where cameras will be physically be installed and ensuring they have a grasp of which networks the cameras will need to access as part of the deployment. It is important to make sure network segmentation is in place isolating cameras and other IoT devices away from more sensitive facility equipment and IT assets.  

    Keep an Eye on Third-Party Risk

    Today, the reality with connected cameras and other physical security controls is you are seldom buying just a camera, badge reader, metal detector, or other hardware. There is usually a private cloud or other networked function embedded by the equipment’s manufacturer. Sometimes, this connectivity is an active feature set—like the ability to view and manage devices on the fly from a mobile app. Other times, connectivity is more hidden. A vendor may require the device to access the Internet through your network for things like warranty eligibility or product updates.

    The common denominator is you end up opening your network to an entire third-party ecosystem, whether you realize it or not. Users ignore this risk at their peril; it cannot go unmanaged.

    In the case of the recent Verkada camera breach, for example, an intruder was able to obtain login credentials that let them access Verkada’s independent back-end cloud platform. This, in turn, meant the intruder could peer into the video feeds of numerous Verkada camera systems deployed around the world—unbeknownst to those customers.

    Verkada is simply one high-profile case. These types of cloud-powered camera systems are used everywhere and have clear deployment, usability, and performance advantages. Do not lose sight of the fact that you inherently shoulder increased third-party risk when you bring service providers on your network, meaning you need to understand how you and the vendor will handle things like credentials and data storage.

    Security Devices Should Never Gain Automatic Trust

    As IoT-driven physical safety and surveillance devices expand in features and computing power, the most important principle is to never grant devices automatic or special privileges simply because of their security labeling.

    If we look inside their code and hardware, these devices function much like video-conferencing systems, smart thermostats, building automation tools, and other nontraditional devices long known to need strong zero trust security policies. Zero trust means you account for every device on the network, do not extend access privileges simply because something has connected previously, and monitor device behavior so you can take action if something begins behaving strangely.

    No technology is perfect and cyber risk management is all about risk tolerance, trade-offs, and mitigating what you can. This includes risks to people and property like fires and burglaries, as well as digital threats to employee data, priceless trade secrets, or corporate reputations. Buyers of connected physical surveillance systems must weigh these risks and ultimately use mitigations like network segmentation to demonstrate that while these devices can enhance needed physical protections, measures are in place to keep irreplaceable data out of the blast radius should cameras, gates, or motion sensors be employed in an attack.

    See Original Post

  • June 09, 2021 5:57 AM | Anonymous

    Reposted from Artnet News

    In an unusual move, the Whitney Museum of American Art announced that it would voluntarily recognize employees’ petition to unionize.

    The decision, which comes nearly two weeks after about 180 workers at the museum filed a petition to join the Technical, Office, and Professional Union of Local 2110, was first reported by Jacobin magazine on May 28. The Whitney staffers are the latest in a wave of museum workers to organize—but part of a very small group to have seen their unions voluntarily recognized by their employer in short order.

    “We respect the desire of our colleagues to engage in a dialogue about collective bargaining, as is their legal right, and we remain committed to supporting all staff, regardless of affiliation,” a representative for the Whitney Museum said in a statement.

    The Whitney staff’s unionization comes at a time when the museum has cut back on staff amid pandemic-induced budget shortfalls. In February, 15 staffers across 11 departments were cut in an effort to address $23 million in losses. That downsizing followed an earlier round in April 2020 when 76 employees, most of whom worked in visitor services-related roles, were laid off.

    “The layoffs were a wake-up call to the need for better protection,” Karissa Francis, a visitor-services assistant who has helmed the unionization effort, said in a statement. “We realized we would have to band together to negotiate for better working conditions.”

    The Whitney staff’s petition with the National Labor Relations Board coincided with another one filed by the Hispanic Society of America in New York. That museum did not respond to a request for comment on where negotiations stand.

    “At many of these institutions, there are corporate boards and highly paid leaders, and yet people on the ground who do the work are paid very low salaries,” Maida Rosenstein, president of UAW Local 2110, which represents the Whitney employees and many other museum workers, told Artnet News when the Whitney first filed its petition.

    Employees at museums around the country have been mobilizing to unionize en masse for about two years, with high-profile examples at the New Museum and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York as well as the Philadelphia Museum, the MFA Boston, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. (Like the Whitney, MOCA also voluntarily recognized its union.)

    Protests stemming from historically low wages and a lack of job security spurred the first wave of union drives, while mass layoffs and furloughs during the pandemic have sparked a second wave of organizing over the past year.

    See Original Post

  • June 09, 2021 5:54 AM | Anonymous

    Reposted from Campus Safety Magazine

    The COVID-19 pandemic brought numerous changes to the ways campuses operated, none more so than to the way they communicated. While many campuses used mass notification systems to deal with pressing emergencies, like active shooters, the pandemic presented a long-term challenge that needed to be actively managed. Many campuses quickly realized how ill-prepared they were to deal with this kind of crisis, requiring them to discover creative uses for tools they already had in place. 

    Mass notification systems went from being a tool used to communicate about an immediate threat on campus, to a primary tool for providing operational updates to people students and staff whether they were on campus or remote. Mass SMS text messaging, push notifications and emails that could reach people on their mobile devices became critical forms of communication. Shifting guidelines and the closing and reopening of campuses required constant interaction and updates. Campus leaders could not afford to have people wait around for the information they needed or to take proper precautions to mitigate the spread of the virus. Rapid, direct communications delivered at regular intervals helped keep people informed and avoided making a bad situation worse.

    Those communications also helped organizations get a better sense for how their communities were handling the crisis. Mass notifications sent asking for a confirmation response or with links to symptom surveys allowed campus leaders to know that messages were being read and gave their community members the ability to pre-screen before engaging in campus activities.

    Mass notification systems that offered scheduling features also helped campuses welcome people back as they reopened. Recorded audio and text messages could be scheduled to broadcast at regular intervals with health and safety reminders for people to wash their hands, maintain social distance and wear masks.

    The ability to customize message text and groups also helped campuses reach the right people with the right information. The instructions given to students were often different than those given to faculty and other staff members. Campus leaders were able to provide updates with flexible messaging options that allowed them to include the latest details about the ongoing situation. Being able to provide clearly outlined information helped to minimize confusion so everyone knew what they should do and when they should be doing it.

    As the pandemic continued, many campuses discovered the incident management benefits mass notification systems offer. By sending out notifications that invited key stakeholders to join conference calls and virtual collaboration spaces, organizations were able to get people together quickly who could assess the situation and determine the best course of action.

    In a small way, the pandemic has offered campuses the opportunity to familiarize themselves with their mass notification systems in a way they may not have been before. Understanding the full capabilities of their tools will make campuses better positioned to prepare for and address future emergencies as normal operations resume.

    See Original Post

  
 

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