Drawing by Thomas T. Waterman of Carter's Grove, part of the Historic American Buildings Survey. Carter's Grove was shut down as a house museum and sold by Colonial Williamsburg back into private hands.

The house museum was once the center of pop culture history in the U.S. But today, once notable places like Colonial Williamsburg’s Carter’s Grove have been shut down and de-accessioned, and house museums across the U.S. and Britain are struggling or closing.

I do not share the doom. I see the damage as entirely self-inflicted. Overly busy curators do make work. Directors lose focus. Boards become inwardly focused. Interpretations become didactic and boring. Donors get worn out, worn down and taken for granted. Capital campaigns take the place of actual mission.

One big hope for house museums comes from the web. Today, the Internet gives each museum a forum where it can communicate to the world. And in spite of budget cuts, there are more resources out there for museums than there were 50 years ago.

Cable television has dozens of channels exclusively devoted to history and home renovation, foundations are more plentiful and governments recognize the importance of house museums. It is time to go on the offensive. Note to boards: if you hear defeatism, you need to make a change.

When house museums are good, the public responds. People are fascinated by seeing houses, and stepping into the domestic past is rewarding in so many ways.

A few years ago, I heard Thomas Savage of Winterthur speak to an Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities dinner. He talked about his youth, visiting house museums, and the need to reinvent the house museum for new audiences. His analysis was on target; in the 1970s, when the Bicentennial was a national mania, attendance was a sort of ritual of families.

Today, most families do not go to house museums, except on school trips, and then only occasionally.

Last week, I was at Fairfax’s Gunston Hall, on assignment for the annual Fairfax County visitor guide. The museum was taking the opposite tack as so many other museums. Instead of deaccessioning collections, they are carefully buying items that include pottery that resembles shards found in archaelogy. They are reaching out to new audiences. And they are regularly conducting research and moving around the rooms so as to better reflect their  evolving knowledge of the period. They are working with local churches and groups on events. They are reaching out and not standing still.

Reach out. Keep your museum open EVERY Day but Christmas and Thanksgiving. Make an effort to give to the community, and they will give back, in droves.

One other piece of advice. One of the most important parts of how a house museum can win visitors is to use the web. Here are some ideas.

1. Use your volunteers to put content on the web. Very often, there are many volunteers at house museums who sit around and wait for visitors, who only rarely arrive. Instead of boring those volunteers by making them sit by the door, get a few laptops and encourage them to key in information about the house to your website. Are there old letters from the owners? Type them up and post them online. Are there old minutes from the founders of the museum? Enter that information in. Other information to put on your website includes names and birthdates from local cemeteries, collections lists, diaries, archival photos, current photos and even audio tours. Do not rest until EVERY object in the collection is posted online, with a description. In Internet parlance, the “long tail” information is important in winning web visitors.
2. Open an Amazon or Ebay store in the name of the museum. There is no better way to sell items from your store than online. Yes, some house museums have expensive online shops. But most house museums do not have the budget. Make sure that you open a museum shop online, and with each item listed for sale, include links back to the main website of your museum. Ebay is also a great way to de-accession useless items that are not historic. An old piece of furniture from the director’s office? Sell it. Someone might appreciate a 1975 chair from a great old house museum.
3. Whatever new you post online, Twitter it. Most people think that Twitter is for getting web readership now. But it also functions as an index of sorts. So if you post a new web page on a historic clock at the house, then you want to “Twitter” the page so that Google can find it.
4. Advertise. Just be careful about it as you can waste lots of money. Remember that for-profit tourist attractions need to advertise to attract visitors. At your local tourism bureau meeting, ask other for-profit attractions about their budgets. Match that percentage. And use Google Adwords, putting a $5 a day limit on the number of clicks. You need to be in the game.
5. Share links with other local attractions. If there is a go-kart track down the road, put up a page of links on your website to other local attractions. Some stuffy people might look askance at this, but the reality is that if you want 13 year old boys to come to your museum, they might do it before or after a visit to a go-kart or Putt-Putt visit.
6. Put out press releases whenever you find a piece of lint. I exaggerate a bit, but make it a  practice to issue press releases regularly, even with small finds. If you have  a full time marketing person, you need to have releases go out at least once a week. While you might occasionally spring for issuing a press release on BusinessWire or PRNewswire, there are man free services where you can post press releases. Press releases will help bring search engines to your site, as well as encourage local newspapers to cover you.
7. Photos, photos. Take lots of photos for Flickr and other sites. Post them online, rights free.
8. Social media: Facebook is great, but it’s not about having a page. Yes, you might want to do like everyone else and have a Facebook page for your museum, but the important thing is that other Facebook users post information about your museum.
9. Content, content: Put as much content out there as you can. Put out educational materials. Put out research papers. Put it all up on the web. And you MUST ensure that your content works with local school boards.
10. Offer the house for free: Give away admissions to the house. LOTS. It’s all about word of mouth. Admissions are only a small part of the budget.
11. Stay away from Flash in websites. You don’t need fancy. You need WORDS. But do pay attention to how your website feels. You want the website to be modern, not “ye olde” as you are trying to attract people in 2009, not 1901. You need to attract the youth, not repel it.
12. Work with other groups on events. Some house museums want to have a strategy where you try to extract as much money as you can from groups who rent your house museum. You want to do the opposite. You want to open up your museum.

Contact Editor Garland Pollard for web ideas for your house museum. Or call him at 703-745-8602.