{"id":24365,"date":"2019-08-03T17:30:14","date_gmt":"2019-08-04T00:30:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=24365"},"modified":"2023-01-31T17:26:18","modified_gmt":"2023-02-01T00:26:18","slug":"air-minded-how-do-museums-work-anyway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=24365","title":{"rendered":"Air-Minded: How Do Museums Work, Anyway?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pima Air and Space Museum<\/a> announced today it’s eliminating the walking tour program. These were volunteer-led tours of aircraft on display inside PASM’s exhibit hangars, free to museum visitors. I was a walking tour docent and team leader from 2011 to 2015, my first four years there, and always enjoyed the interaction with museum visitors. These days I’m a tram docent, taking visitors on tours of the outdoor aircraft displayed on\u00a0PASM’s grounds. The fun\u00a0of interacting with visitors and answering their questions is the same, but there’s a difference: visitors have to buy an extra ticket to ride on the tram, so for the past four years I’ve actually been helping the museum stay afloat financially.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_6320\"<\/a>
Boarding guests for the PASM tram tour<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So far this year the museum\u00a0has eliminated three sets of volunteers. First to go were the greeters, the\u00a0men and women who met arriving visitors at the museum entrance, handed out guides, and told guests where different aircraft\u00a0are displayed and how to get there. As of today, the walking tour docents have likewise been\u00a0cut loose. In between were the Boneyard tour guides, the team of a dozen volunteers who narrated bus tours of the 4,000-odd military aircraft in storage at the nearby 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, who have been replaced by three full-time salaried tour guides.<\/p>\n

A cynic would observe that greeters and free walking tours didn’t make money for the museum. True, but the Boneyard tours do, and so do the tram tours, both of which visitors pay extra for. So I can’t help wondering why the museum would get rid of a dozen unpaid expert tour guides\u00a0and replace them with paid workers, because now the museum is making less money off those tours than before. Then again, maybe the cost has been factored in and they’re charging more for Boneyard tickets.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_0362:<\/a>
Some of the aircraft on the tram route at Pima Air and Space Museum (photo: Paul Woodford)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When I first mentioned\u00a0the plan to replace Boneyard volunteers<\/a> with paid tour guides, I wondered\u00a0if museum staff might be considering something similar for the tram tours. Our team of volunteers, each of whom come in one day a week, could be replaced with two, maybe three paid full-timers. The\u00a0museum could probably get away with hiring minimum-wage\u00a0workers: do\u00a0they really need\u00a0our\u00a0experience and knowledge\u00a0when\u00a0they\u00a0could simply play a taped narration\u00a0over the tram speakers and\u00a0instruct\u00a0the new drivers to keep up with the spiel?<\/p>\n

When I got this morning’s mass email announcing\u00a0the end of the walking tour program, I\u00a0replied to the staffer who sent it, asking if my fellow tram docents and I still have a future at the museum. She\u00a0responded, assuring me we do. Her reply didn’t deliver the intended warm & fuzzy, but since I still like what I’m doing at PASM, especially the interaction with museum visitors, I’ll keep plugging away. But something’s going on, and I won’t be surprised … disappointed, yes, but not surprised … if my days at Pima Air and Space Museum turn out to be numbered.<\/p>\n

Over the past two years I’ve sensed a growing antipathy from museum staff toward the volunteers who work with visitors (as far as I know,\u00a0this antipathy doesn’t apply\u00a0to the hundred or so volunteers who work behind the scenes in aircraft restoration). I don’t know exactly where it’s coming from, whether it’s just one person on the staff or several, and I certainly don’t know enough to point fingers. It’s definitely there, though, and I’m far from the only volunteer to feel it. How else to explain replacing free labor with paid labor?<\/p>\n

I don’t claim to know\u00a0anything about the museum business, but\u00a0I\u00a0go to other air museums every chance I get, and have\u00a0yet to visit one that doesn’t rely on large numbers of unpaid volunteers to interact with guests. That gives me\u00a0hope for a future at PASM after all. We’ll see.<\/p>\n\n\n

\u2014 back to the Air-Minded Index<\/strong><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t claim to know\u00a0anything about the museum business, but\u00a0I\u00a0go to other air museums every chance I get, and have\u00a0yet to visit one that doesn’t rely on large numbers of unpaid volunteers to interact with guests.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1960,3,555,2761],"tags":[619,2843],"class_list":["post-24365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-air-minded","category-flying","category-local-color","category-yell-clouds","tag-air-museum","tag-volunteers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24365"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24365\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32640,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24365\/revisions\/32640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}