Royal Canadian Numismatic Association 2020 Convention Cancelled (May 20, 2020)
From the press release:

Canadian Coin News Closing Physical Office (May 21, 2020)

To read the complete article, see:
CCN relocating with no retail outlet (https://canadiancoinnews.com/ccn-relocating-with-no-retail-outlet/)

How Nonprofits Can Cope (May 20, 2020)

I decided that our survival strategy had to be keeping everyone employed in a whole new way, all while they worked from home.

So I shifted our program from being visitor-driven to something new. I started by doing an analysis of our budget. Of our overall expenses, 60% represents staff costs with the remaining 40% being programmatic and departmental expenses.

We didn't want to cut the amount needed to support staff, whether our doors were closed or open. That left us cutting all remaining programmatic and departmental line items we could find, from installation costs and supplies to advertising andsummer programs.

I asked my department heads, ranging from communications and membership to facilities and collections management, to come up with a list of rainy-day initiatives that they'd always wanted to accomplish but never could, due to the normallynever-ending cycle of planning and staging exhibitions. These weren't to be make-work jobs. This had to be mission-centric, both to have our staffers feel like they were adding value and to have them make the type of impact we and any donor wouldexpect to see.

After developing a list of about 30 projects, we gave all our staff members a questionnaire asking them to rate themselves on skills ranging from visual literacy to writing to Photoshop. By matching skills to project requirements, we were able toreassign to various tasks 32 staff members whose jobs had been most at risk, even enlisting several as project managers.

While others, like our curators- who always welcome time for writing and research-could more easily work from home, everyone has been part of the redesigned museum in some way.

We introduced online "behind-the-scenes" talks alongside virtual exhibitions, which you've seen at other museums during the quarantine, but the bulk of the work wasn't sexy. These were, however, essential projects that advanced our mission andstretched our capabilities. So security guards now spend their days going through images on the Blanton website, writing alternative text descriptions for the visually impaired. It turned out that the museum's primary maintenance guy, who normallyhandles paint touch-ups and AC repair, has beautiful handwriting. The development department now has him writing thank-you notes to donors. Staffers who normally plan events or install art are now assembling digital dossiers on our more obscureartists, the kind for which the best research lurks in the corners of the internet rather than in books.

So far, the plan has worked and our team is paid. But it is a fragile equation that will continue to depend on philanthropic investment and constant innovation. We will, in time, open our doors again. But for now we are keeping the museumgoing-all of us.

To read the complete article (subscription required), see:
The Creative Way We Avoided Layoffs (https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-creative-way-we-avoided-layoffs-11589918932)

A Blind Coin Collector's Perspective (May 23, 2020)
In his May 23rd email, Tom Babinszki of the Blind Coin Collector blog writes:

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
CORONAVIRUS UPDATES: MAY 17, 2020 (https://www.coinbooks.org/v23/esylum_v23n20a16.html)

Bumper Tables

An event planning company in Baltimore has unveiled a unique way to socialize while practicing social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic.

Revolution Event Design & Production created what it is calling a "bumper table," a table with wheels attached to the bottom of its legs and surrounded by an inflated inner tube. The creation keeps participants six feet from each other, butallows them the opportunity to talk, eat or drink in social settings.

"When COVID hit, we found ourselves with a lot of time on our hands because people aren't exactly booking events in the immediate future," said Erin Cermak, Revolution's founder and CEO, who hatched the idea for the bumper tables. "We wanted tocome up with a creative and fun way to keep everyone safe and compliant, but still bring back the social and festive and party aspect of the event. So we've been working on a number of different products, and this is the first one that we'relaunching."

The bumper tables made their debut Saturday at Fish Tales, a restaurant in Ocean City. Cermak is a cousin of Donna Harman, who along with her husband Shawn have owned Fish Tales for 37 years.

To read the complete article, see:
'Bumper tables' made of inner tubes: Here's how one Ocean City restaurant plans to enforce social distancing(https://www.baltimoresun.com/coronavirus/bs-md-bumper-table-revolution-20200518-z2wrplx6xvgfnd7hquzptiz7ka-story.html)