Returning to work after being furloughed

April 1st I came back to work from furlough, and mid-April was my first trip back onsite since the November prior. I made monthly visits for the rest of the spring to fulfill reference requests. It felt strange returning - I was thankful to have a paycheck from the museum again, it was great to virtually meet with colleagues again, and the physical archive itself is a comfort in its own (relatively) unchanging, indifferent way. But it’s challenging not to feel some anger and frustration for everyone who was furloughed and those who weren’t furloughed but bore the brunt of increased workloads. And the negative feelings extend to how workers at the museum and beyond have been treated in capitalist societies. Many actions taken - layoffs, workers being forced to come onsite often without necessary protective equipment while the pandemic raged, pay cuts, furloughs - were described as inevitabilities when in reality these were choices made by those with power. In many cases, though the resulting economic downturn from the pandemic has been blamed as the catalyst for these actions, there is sufficient money available. Wealth and power is further consolidated during wide scale emergencies like this one. 

A visual representation in the form of many notations on a catalog card of all the workers who have worked with this archive.

Routine work - finding and digitizing large format negatives like this one - does provide some grounding after months of instability.

It seems reasonable that those who survived the last year would move on from this experience with a different understanding of the way the world works, and how unnecessarily fraught of existences so many live. I sincerely hope that collectively, we don’t attempt to return to “business as usual.” We need better safety nets for people, and folks shouldn’t have to work in order to sustain themselves. It remains to be seen what, if anything, we carry with us moving forward. Seeing downtown emerging from winter, green replacing gray, and blossoms emerging is a reminder that time marches on. What we make of our time is up to us.

A view of Grant Park and the skyline, Chicago.

Maggie Daley Park with skyscrapers in the background, Chicago.

Lilacs blooming outside of the museum, Chicago.

A moment of peace in the north gardens of the museum on a sunny day.

The end of 2020, the beginning of 2021

Last month saw some major life changes, and some serious ups and downs. On one hand, my partner and I closed on and moved into a lovely 2-flat building with our close friends. Buying a home never felt like a possibility, but with the news that the apartment building we were collectively living in was being sold (which had happened in the previous building all of us lived in), we recognized there would be more stability in owning. Through the guidance of some very helpful professionals, we found our new home. It feels good to know we can put down some roots, continue to be neighbors with our pals, and it’s exciting to have the chance to get to know a new (to us) neighborhood. This opportunity still feels unreal, and I’m so thankful for it.

On the other hand, less than a week after our closing, I was informed that I would be furloughed from January until at least March, along with over 100 staff at the museum. The governor’s order to close all museums back in November was the justification used for this measure, along with several layoffs and pay cuts non-furloughed staff were forced to take. After 4 weeks of being furloughed, around 40 of us have been told that we will be furloughed until at least April, even though the museum has been given the green light to open. I am frustrated and sad for those departments that have been particularly hard hit - our education team, and the library and archives - given how committed these teams are to their work, their colleagues, and the communities they support. I’m also concerned about non-furloughed staff and the likelihood that they are taking on more work given their coworkers’ absences. Unsurprisingly, this is compounding on an already difficult time for so many, and one that’ll leave its mark for some time to come.

I suppose the closing lessons of 2020 and opening lessons of 2021 are those of the unpredictability of life and the need to find grounding regardless of what’s happening in the outside world. I still struggle to accept and embrace these realities, but it would seem I’ll have many more opportunities to practice and grow. 

Onsite visits to the museum during COVID-19

My first trip back to the museum for work happened in mid-September, and I’ve been back once a month since then. Core essential staff have been required to be onsite since the closure - teams including security, facilities, and housekeeping. Over the summer, limited additional teams whose work required them to be on campus were allowed to return in a controlled manner. This coincided with institution-wide layoffs and restructuring. I kept my job, but was moved to a new department. Regardless, both my old and new departments were permitted to return onsite. And so, to date, I’ve made three trips back to the museum.

The first trip back marked six months since the majority of the museum started working remotely. I had quite a few reference requests that required access to our card catalog and physical archives, so this took up a substantial portion of my time. I also ensured that the collection was generally intact, and that there were no glaring environmental or other condition issues that needed attention. I wrapped up the trip by gathering some information about the collection itself for my old department’s standard operating procedures manual - documentation that’s proven to be helpful in the transition to my new department.

The second and third trips back felt slightly less frenzied in pace. Given the shorter time between these visits, far fewer reference requests had built up. This meant that I had time to turn to another project: digitizing our exhibition documentation catalog cards. Totalling roughly three drawers, these cards hold information for which exhibitions at the museum were documented between the early 1900s and 1970s. After this time, this information was captured digitally in a series of databases for the department. I managed to get through the digitization of all 3,000+ cards. 

Since queries for exhibitions are common, my hope is that the digitized cards will be a useful reference for me and other staff. But to make access even easier, I plan on transcribing the exhibition titles and unique identifiers for the corresponding negatives or transparencies. And to facilitate future plans for the comprehensive digitization of all these photographic materials, and to link the images with the exhibition records in our collections management system, I aim to link the archive’s unique identifiers with the exhibition record IDs. In turn, this should result in many more archival images on the exhibition portal of the public website.

I’ve struggled with the idea that non-essential organizations like our museum should open, given the very real risk of COVID in our city, state, and country. The museum has recently been forced by our governor to close the museum to the public given the surge in cases leading up the holidays, though this closure does not apply to staff. I feel extraordinarily lucky to have been able to set my own schedule for returning to work, and I wish that this was the case for everyone. I hope that the exhibition documentation catalog card project can provide additional work for museum staff working remotely, especially if we return to a broader closure of the campus. It’s hard to anticipate what the future will bring these days, but I’m grateful to still be employed, to have found ways of doing my work, and for all the support and camaraderie of my colleagues.