Living Computer Museum

[corey cohen]

I manage the finance for the VCF Museum and our shows, which means I also deal with our “artifact loans”.   It is a lot of paperwork.  Only “special” items are worth the hassle.

As for museums closing… Its tough when you can’t have visitors who help pay for the day to day operational costs with the admission price and many of those visitors become potential sponsors. 

For us at VCF, this isn’t so bad because we don’t take any regular admission money from InfoAge (our parent museum) and are exclusively volunteers which allows us to have a much lower overhead than traditional museums like LCM. VCF is also an independent 501c3 charity which means there is a lot of help out there to keep our doors open and we also planned for rainy days.   I can tell you that we had big plans for our shows this year, but so far two of those shows (including one at LCM) had to be moved to virtual thanks to Covid-19 so we are now in rainy day territory, but we actually planned for a monsoon, so we will be fine. 

Museums like LCM that aren’t quite a fully independent 501c3 charity yet (I think they had plans for this before Covid) will have trouble as their parent corporations look to save money.   Hopefully LCM can make the transition and spread their support base out to the public, who I think are very appreciative of their mission.

Cheers,
Corey


> On May 28, 2020, at 4:14 AM, Dave Wade via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> On Behalf Of Chris Hanson via
>> cctalk
>> Sent: 28 May 2020 04:54
>> To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
>> <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
>> Subject: Re: Living Computer Museum
>> 
>> On May 27, 2020, at 8:48 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr <jecel at merlintec.com>
>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I would think that if people you liked got replaced with people who
>>> don't care then you might have a major battle trying to get back stuff
>>> you loaned.
>> 
>> It might be a battle, possibly even a major one, but it would be
>> fundamentally winnable when there’s explicitly no transfer of ownership.
>> 
>> That may, of course, be why they told Alan they don’t take loans; they may
>> want to not worry about dealing with people who want loaned pieces
>> returned, or dealing with the risk of loss or damage (e.g. insurance), and so
>> on.
>> 
>>  -- Chris
> 
> Its a challenge. Most Museums refuse to accept loans. It’s a lot of admin. If the original owner dies what happens.
> Under what terms can it be removed. Value if stolen or damaged? If it is working and it breaks.
> A lot of hassle and risk.
> 
> Dave
>