General Arts and Culture News

[dtkvictim]

Doon village was mostly closed off to visitors: we were able to see the train and surrounding buildings and one house, but we couldn't see anything across the bridge which is a majority of the structures.

Doon Heritage Village is currently under renovations until 2025.

Makes you wonder that maybe they’d get more visitors if it was in a place near where people actually lived, instead of a place you just drove by and immediately forgot?

Not that I disagree about the location, his post didn't suggest anything about a shortage of visitors.

[tomh009]

I went to the Waterloo Region Museum on Huron Road this weekend and they're severely short staffed.  They only seemed to have 3 employees in the whole building. The snack bar was closed and no one was around to run the gift store, I supposed the person at the front desk can walk over but she was busy dealing with some patrons when I was there.

One of the childrens activities was cancelled because of a lack of staffing, the kids were to construct simple bird feeders.

The area near the windows on the upper floor were littered with a number of live and dead flies so it appears they cut back on cleaning staff as well.

Doon village was mostly closed off to visitors: we were able to see the train and surrounding buildings and one house, but we couldn't see anything across the bridge which is a majority of the structures.

I used to go here every once in awhile but I don't think I'll be back unless I hear that they've turned things around or if they get an interesting temporary exhibit.

Makes you wonder that maybe they’d get more visitors if it was in a place near where people actually lived, instead of a place you just drove by and immediately forgot?

Given that they have the pioneer village, I don't think it's realistic to relocate anywhere closer to the city. But the location may make it harder yet to attract staff. I expect they'll have better staffing in the summer using student labour (they certainly did when I worked there as a student, many moons ago) but by September they'd be back to regular staff and maybe some part-timers (if they can attract those).

And I think it's the lack of staff that causes the issues JoeKW pointed out.

[JoeKW]

Doon village was mostly closed off to visitors: we were able to see the train and surrounding buildings and one house, but we couldn't see anything across the bridge which is a majority of the structures.

Doon Heritage Village is currently under renovations until 2025.

Makes you wonder that maybe they’d get more visitors if it was in a place near where people actually lived, instead of a place you just drove by and immediately forgot?

Not that I disagree about the location, his post didn't suggest anything about a shortage of visitors.

You're right, I didn't mention a shortage of visitors but there were only a handful of people there.

[nms]

Doon Heritage Village (previously Doon Pioneer Village (1957-1985; and Doon Heritage Crossroads (1985-2010)) is located where it is because of the  crossroads of the east-west Huron Road and the north-south train line.  That crossroads is now inside the Museum.  The living history museum actually inspired the creation of Upper Canada Village (opened 1958).  Black Creek Pioneer Village (opened 1960) is perhaps more accessible as it is nestled between York University and suburban development (and the highway 400/407 interchange).

I think the Museum struggles with what to do with itself; the outdoor space was envisioned as living history museum, but the living history portion definitely suffered when more attention was given to the new building and exhibits.  The living history portion was quite purposely set to recreate 1914 rural life in Waterloo as that was an inflection point for the County.  To try to dress it for any other time period would not work.  The current renovations are largely infrastructure upgrades which would have made it difficult to keep the space open to the public.

The new Museum building has a very good permanent display of local history that runs from Indigenous history to today.  The building has two smaller temporary exhibit spaces.  I'm not a Museum professional so I don't know if there is a general guideline of how much exhibit space should be permanent and how much should be for temporary or traveling exhibits to entice visitors to come back once they have seen all of the permanent displays.  Something like the ROM or the AGO in Toronto, or the various National museums in Ottawa likely have something where 80-90% of the space is for a larger permanent displays, but with enough variety that multiple visitors are possible without feeling that you have seen everything.


As for staffing, there are currently 5 vacancies available for External hiring in the Museums & Libraries department which covers the Regional Museum, Schneider House, McDougall Cottage and the back-of-house archives and collections:
- 2 "Museum Experience Specialist" (Permanent Full-Time)
- 1 "Student, Library Page" (Permanent, Part-time)
- 1 "Artifact Conservation Technician" (Temporary, Full-Time)
- 1 "Student, Museum Cataloguing & Records" (Temporary, Full-Time)

[panamaniac]

One thing that puzzles me about the Regional History Museum is the lack of public fundraising. There's a small "friends of the museum" group, but the Museum itself seems to run on government grants.

[panamaniac]

If you're up for a bit of high brow, the KW Chamber Music Society (worth checking out) is hosting a pay what you can fundraiser with players from the former KW Symphony. This Wednesday at 7:00pm at First United Church, Waterloo.

[timio]

Makes you wonder that maybe they’d get more visitors if it was in a place near where people actually lived, instead of a place you just drove by and immediately forgot?

Given that they have the pioneer village, I don't think it's realistic to relocate anywhere closer to the city. But the location may make it harder yet to attract staff. I expect they'll have better staffing in the summer using student labour (they certainly did when I worked there as a student, many moons ago) but by September they'd be back to regular staff and maybe some part-timers (if they can attract those).

And I think it's the lack of staff that causes the issues JoeKW pointed out.

Last year, they only were open Wed[or Thurs] to Sunday 11-4, even during the summer. A decade ago, they were open 7 days 9-5, down to 5 (for the village) during the fall with the occasional special event on weekends [source: know someone worked there for a few summers/falls]. The museum was open 7 days, IIRC. There was generally no issue in recruiting students to work there, even when it was slightly off the beaten path.

What's more likely at play is the pandemic impacting budgets in the tourism sector even when the broader hours would most definitely drive more visitors.

[taylortbb]

One thing that puzzles me about the Regional History Museum is the lack of public fundraising.  There's a small "friends of the museum" group, but the Museum itself seems to run on government grants.

It's directly operated by the region, all the staff there are employees of the region. So it's not a private organization that would need to fundraise in that way.

[ac3r]

I went to the Waterloo Region Museum on Huron Road this weekend and they're severely short staffed.  They only seemed to have 3 employees in the whole building.

Probably due to how awful and annoying the RoW hiring process is. Good god it sucks. With the amount of international students here they could easily staff the place but yeah...getting hired by RoW is incredibly tedious. It's like they collected the worst human resource morons on the planet and hired them all, while having the most by the book hiring process you can think of (and then some).

[panamaniac]

I went to the Waterloo Region Museum on Huron Road this weekend and they're severely short staffed.  They only seemed to have 3 employees in the whole building.

Probably due to how awful and annoying the RoW hiring process is. Good god it sucks. With the amount of international students here they could easily staff the place but yeah...getting hired by RoW is incredibly tedious. It's like they collected the worst human resource morons on the planet and hired them all, while having the most by the book hiring process you can think of (and then some).

Passed over for a job, were we?

[bravado]

I always got the impression that cultural institutions were like transit and had to constantly justify their continued budget and existence with ridership/visitors revenue. Plonking a museum in a place that nobody would ever casually visit just seems like a problem. It is a good actual building and collection, but still very suburban. This seems like something that council would eventually tire of fully funding through tough times.

[ac3r]

Probably due to how awful and annoying the RoW hiring process is. Good go guyd it sucks. With the amount of international students here they could easily staff the place but yeah...getting hired by RoW is incredibly tedious. It's like they collected the worst human resource morons on the planet and hired them all, while having the most by the book hiring process you can think of (and then some).

Passed over for a job, were we?

No, I got it and was on staff for a couple years. I just thought the hiring process was unnecessarily convoluted.

[tomh009]

I always got the impression that cultural institutions were like transit and had to constantly justify their continued budget and existence with ridership/visitors revenue. Plonking a museum in a place that nobody would ever casually visit just seems like a problem. It is a good actual building and collection, but still very suburban. This seems like something that council would eventually tire of fully funding through tough times.

The plonkage happened already something like 65 years ago. And it would be no small task to replonk in a better plonking area.

[KevinL]

Yeah, the museum might not exist if the suburban location with ideal property, already holding a heritage institution, had not been pre-existing. It is unfortunate that it's on an arterial road with poor transit access, especially now that more of the population is moving on from cars.

There had been a consideration of adding a bus stop closer by, but our legendary regional traffic engineers wouldn't permit a pedestrian crossing to allow stops in both directions, so another unfortunate reality.

[Acitta]

It is only a 30-minute bike ride from downtown Kitchener. I have frequently biked past there over the past 22 years, though I never got around to visiting the heritige village and only visited the Museum once, when it first opened. I don't see being in the suburbs something that would keep people away, especially for the car addicted.