The Marin History Museum will shut down on August 31, due to lack of operating funds. The small museum, located in San Rafael, has been struggling to sustain the money to stay open over the past several years. Few people visit the museum, and 90 percent of the staff is volunteers. The struggle to stay open has been too hard, so the board of directors has voted to shut the museum down. The museum contains 20,000 artifacts and 200,000 photographs of early Marin, which will not be available to the public after the closing.

The museum board has also been selling artifacts from their collection in order to get rid of the artifacts because there will not be a place to store them once the museum is closed. Many Marin residents were outraged to hear this because it is against the rules of being a non profit organization. Laura Ackley, a resident of San Rafael has created a group of about 10 people who are aiming to help the museum figure out where the remaining artifacts could be stored. “Our first priority is to prevent anything more from leaving the collection,” Ackley told the Marin IJ. “I’d hate to see the cultural patrimony of our county scattered, thrown away or sold illegally with no permission or involvement by the public whose trust the organization has sworn to uphold.”

As of now the museum is still planning to shut down despite the attention that it has received the past couple weeks.