Elasticity. This is the first word that comes to mind in the last 16 months when I think of the University of Alaska Museum of the North (UAMN). During its nearly centenary, UAMN has faced many challenges, but the Covid-19 pandemic was a storm for the record books. Like our parent organization, the University of Alaska, our staff and supporters everywhere have recognized the importance of serving our expanded community of stakeholders, especially during this global crisis.

Like most US museums, the pandemic has had a profound impact on our operations on many levels. To begin with, we reluctantly closed our doors to the public on March 13, 2020 and closed our physical exhibits for several months. Instructor-led K-12 tours of our galleries, which usually thrived in the spring season, came to an abrupt halt when distance learning became the norm. And students, lecturers and visiting scholars who had planned study and scientific work in our collections did not have access to the largest individual holdings of cultural and natural history collections in the country.

Although it was necessary, we were sad to close our public galleries. When we finally reopened in July 2020, the number of visitors was only 5% of the 2019 figures. This had significant consequences for our financial results. As government funding for the university continues to decline, the UAMN has increasingly relied on admissions and store sales for our bread and butter. In a normal year, visitor income is nearly 50 percent of our total annual income (followed by grants and then government dollars). Hence, the almost lack of tourism in 2020 led to an extreme belt buckle.

In the face of financial uncertainty, largely teleworking staff, and ever evolving plans to contain Covid that restricted access to buildings, the museum faced a critical threat to fulfill its core mission of collecting, preserving Alaska’s cultural and natural history to study, teach and exhibit. As a state and federal archive, many agencies also rely on UAMN to house public collections as we have the facilities and expertise to care for Alaska’s treasures. The fact that we did not wait idly for better times shows the commitment and dedication of our employees. Rather, we have recognized the urgency to continue serving our large community of stakeholders, especially during these troubled times. We also took this unforeseen opportunity to adapt and diversify.

On the surface, shutting down a museum’s operations may seem trivial, especially our research collections, which take up much of the museum’s lower level. In reality, the collections are a dynamic, lively, constantly changing unit. Similar to a centuries-old wooden sailing ship, you have to constantly repair the sails, tar the rigging and pump the holds. Failure to do the thousands of tasks puts the entire ship at risk. Likewise, UAMN’s diverse holdings, which include over 2.5 million art and artifacts, plant and animal specimens, and my personal favorites – fossils, need to be cleaned, preserved, repositioned, monitored, loan processing and databases created. It’s a never-ending task. Our collections also include one of the largest frozen tissue samples in the country, stored in liquid nitrogen cryovates and used by researchers around the world to track genetic changes, diseases and environmental pollutants in plants and animals. Simply put, simply turning off the lights and coming back a year later is never an option.

We also strived to better serve our visitors, who number up to 90,000 in a year without a pandemic. Most importantly, UAMN can now proudly boast the only articulated and suspended bowhead whale skeleton in North America. The bowhead whale is an iconic species of the Arctic, and our specimen, harvested by Iñupiaq whalers in Utqiagvik in 1963, shows the tightly woven fabric that is both cultural and natural. The project was financed at the end of 2019 through a generous gift from the Bill Ströcker Foundation. When the Covid-19 clouds began to gather in early 2020, we decided not to throw this project off track with the pandemic. Indeed, the bowhead whale has become a symbol of our collective desire and perseverance to make the most of a bad situation. Assembling the skeleton and producing a new special exhibition, Perspective: Ways to See a Whale, provided much-needed inspiration during the 16 month process and brought together the talents of many different museum and university employees who are committed to completing this world used. Show class.

Knowing that many families could not come to our exhibits for over a year, we invested a lot of energy in putting our exhibits online to share at home. We have expanded our virtual museum (www.uaf.edu/museum/virtualmuseum) to include additional exhibits and collections, video podcasts, as well as activities and lesson plans. Via our immersive app (free to download) you can now also enjoy an interactive 3D replica of our exhibition “ShAKe: Earthquakes in Interior Alaska”. In autumn 2020 we acquired the internationally known bus 142 (“Into the Wild Bus”) and are in the process of preparing it for a later exhibition for a free outdoor exhibition. We even moved our museum shop to a wonderful new space and we now have many products online.

Our education and public programs team continued to deliver creative new ways, such as virtual versions of our popular family programs. They also created and distributed almost 1,000 educational packages for families so that they can get to know our museum collections in a hands-on way at home. Museum curators and collection managers also developed a new college-level museum studies curriculum and taught the first courses online at the UAF in the final academic year.

I am very proud of our curators, staff and students who made this work possible. What really sustained us is the deep commitment of our employees to preserve and share our Alaskan heritage. The support of our university and the trust of our sponsors are just as important. The pandemic is not over yet, but UAMN will continue to hold our shared history, conduct research and share knowledge through world-class exhibits and public relations.

Patrick Druckermiller is the director of the Museum of the North at the University of Alaska. For more information on the museum’s programs and events, see www.uaf.edu/museum or call 474-7505.

Patrick Druckermiller is the director of the Museum of the North at the University of Alaska. For more information on the museum’s programs and events, see www.uaf.edu/museum or call 474-7505.