Dear colleagues,
Dear friends,
I hope that this message finds you all well. All of us for now have been struck by the worldwide struggle against the spreading of the covid-19. All over Europe universities have been shut down and we have been confronted with developing action plans in a very short time to protect ourselves, our public and user communities; but also to guarantee the preservation and security of our collections. Most of us are still working on this and some of us are already facing economic difficulties with impact on our employees. These issues concern the whole community of U-museum and collections.
You will not be surprised, and some might be relieved, that our Belgian hosts together with the Universeum board have decided to cancel this June’s annual conference. After discussing different options, and because we had already planned a joint meeting with UMAC in Dresden next year, we thought that 2022 would be the most appropriate date to move this year’s annual conference in Belgium.
I would like to thank warmly our Belgian colleagues who worked hard to organize what would have been a great conference and especially the students who were deeply involved. I am very much looking forward to 2022 as we know what was prepared for this year.
I also wanted to sincerely thank the colleagues who sent abstracts despite the uncertainty.
During these times, we have all started to reflect on how to maintain our activities, how to stay connected with colleagues, students and our various public and pushed to use digitals.
Staying connected is certainly one of the most important paths to follow at the moment and as a network it is our core value to keep the community of UNIVERSEUM together. A lot of initiatives have been taken already by other networks and of course we would like also to offer opportunities to share, exchange, discuss between our own community. Our Belgian host and the board of universeum will get back to you very quickly to make proposals in this direction.
Till then take good care of yourselves and more than ever let’s keep in touch!
The other Universeum Board members join me in wishing you all the best.
Sébastien Soubiran, President of Universeum