Today is International Museum Day

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 Monday, May 18, 2020 - 09:16

Today is International Museum Day, co-ordinated by the International Council of Museums (ICOM), which will run with the theme “Museums for Equality: Diversity and Inclusion”. It aims at becoming a rallying point to both celebrate the diversity of perspectives that make up the communities and personnel of museums, and champion tools for identifying and overcoming bias in what they display and the stories they tell.

The Gibraltar National Museum first celebrated the day with an Open Day in 2002. Since then, the open day has become a regular feature of the museum’s calendar, being held on the Saturday closest to the 18th May. The popularity of the Open Day in the local community exceeded all expectations and this year would have seen its nineteenth edition.

Unfortunately, with the COVID-19 outbreak, it will not be possible for the museum to hold this event in the usual manner but the good news is that there will be a Virtual Open Day!

This will take the form of intensified Virtual Museum activities.

Since the Virtual Museum commenced eight weeks ago, on 17th March, there have been more than 130 thousand visits to its posts on Facebook. Of these, around 83 thousand (close to 64%) have actually been engagements with the posts.

This is a remarkable statistic which reflects the growth of local interest in the museum, and in Gibraltar’s rich history and natural history, during lockdown. Since the start of the virtual museum, the museum’s following also increased dramatically by around 1,250 to a total of 5,155 on Tuesday 12th March; an estimated 77% of these are from Gibraltar.

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18-05-2020 PANORAMAdailyGIBRALTAR