UK Museums during the COVID-19 crisis: Assessing risk, closure, and resilience

博物馆是英国文化和经济版图的重要组成部分。仅在英格兰，它们每年就吸引了1亿游客，年营业额为26.4亿GB。政府和非政府博物馆机构的高级工作人员深感担忧，许多博物馆将无法在新冠肺炎的影响下幸存下来，并对文化和经济景观造成相关损失。尽管博物馆机构正在紧急寻求资金并制定政策来管理新冠肺炎的影响，但他们还没有建立机制来收集英国博物馆部门的全面数据，追踪哪些博物馆面临关闭的风险，哪些博物馆实际上已经关闭。因此，他们在信息不充分的情况下继续进行。该项目将为博物馆机构提供准确、及时的数据，了解哪些博物馆面临关闭的风险，哪些博物馆关闭，哪些博物馆仍具有弹性，以及英国博物馆行业的形象如何因新冠肺炎而发生变化。我们将制定适用于当前危机的风险和弹性指标，并评估发生的关闭是否对特定受众和地区造成不成比例的影响。研究借鉴了现有研究团队的专业知识，结合了定量和定性技术，包括网络抓取、自然语言处理、基于访谈的研究和原始数据收集。

Museums are a vital part of the UK's cultural and economic landscape. In England alone, they attract 100 million annual visits and have a turnover of £2.64 billion per annum. Senior staff in governmental and non-governmental museum agencies are deeply concerned that many museums will not survive the impact of COVID-19 with a correlative loss to the cultural and economic landscape. Although museum agencies are urgently seeking funding and developing policy to manage the impact of COVID-19, they do not have established mechanisms for gathering comprehensive data on the UK museum sector, for tracking which museums are at risk of closure, and which actually close. Thus, they proceed with inadequate information. This project will provide museum agencies with rigorous, timely data on which museums are at risk of closure, which museums close, which remain resilient, and how the profile of the UK museum sector changes as a result of COVID-19. We will develop indicators for risk and resilience that are applicable within the current crisis and assess whether the closures that occur have a disproportionate impact on particular audiences and localities.The research draws on the expertise of an existing research team and combines quantitative and qualitative techniques including web-scraping, natural language processing, interview-based research, and primary data collection.