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Many museums across the USA are experiencing declining attendance and budget crises they blame on rising gas prices, a drop in school field trips and shrinking interest in history and art.
"The overall trend is moving down," says Timothy Walch, director of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library & Museum in West Branch, Iowa. It had 16% fewer visitors last year than in 2004.
A museum honoring James Dean near Fairmount, Ind., closed in March after 16 years. "It was quite stressful," manager David Loehr says. He'll auction off much of his collection in October. The Children's Discovery Museum in San Diego; the African American Museum in Tacoma, Wash.; and the Palm Beach, Fla., Institute of Contemporary Art all closed last year.
Others, including big attractions such as Virginia's Colonial Williamsburg and venerable ones such as the Maryland Historical Society, have had problems. Williamsburg's annual attendance is down from 1.2million in the '80s to just more than 700,000 last year. The Maryland Historical Society has a $1.2 million deficit.
Two relatively new presidential libraries and museums are prospering, though: Abraham Lincoln's in Springfield, Ill., and Bill Clinton's in Little Rock.
Local history and pride are at stake, says Nancy Perry, museum director for the city of Plymouth, Va. Attendance at the Children's Museum there fell 14% in the last fiscal year after many schools canceled field trips. "Museums are really a cornerstone for a community," she says, and they "build family interaction."
Overall, the American Association of Museums says, attendance has been "relatively flat" since 2000. Problems are worst in small towns, where museums and historical societies depend on county or city funds and donations instead of grants or endowments.
Curator Wes Anderson is the only paid employee at the Barnes County Historical Society in Valley City, N.D. The society recently sold a building where its museum was once located and, without that rental income, he worries about staying solvent. "The society is at a crucial time," he says. Its annual budget is $50,000.
At the Bootheel Youth Museum in Malden, Mo., attendance dropped after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and slowly rebounded, director Patsy Reublin says. "Now with gas prices, I am assuming we will begin yet another decline," she says.
Museums try new exhibits and programs to draw visitors. The Hoover museum's circus exhibit last year was a bust, but one on the 1960s has attendance up 10% so far this year, Walch says.
Virginia's Perry says special programs, including those highlighting African-American artists and inventors, attract crowds. Colonial Williamsburg has added actors who engage in live street theater.
Bruce Teeple, a historian and former curator in Aaronsburg, Pa., says museums must be more provocative. "History is more than a quilt (or) a stick of furniture," he says. "It's time to use history to understand and appreciate the role of change in our lives."
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