PREHISTORIC SOCIETY STATEMENT ON
RESEARCH ACCESS TO MUSEUM COLLECTIONS
The Council of the Prehistoric Society has learned of an increasing number of cases of museums
charging researchers for access to their collections. We are fully aware of the difficult financial
decisions that many museums confront, particularly in the current phase of economic stringencies,
but it remains important to hold to established and fundamental principles. We believe charges for
research access, with rare exceptions (below) to be ethically wrong in relation to the role of
museums in caring for collections that belong to the public and we also believe it to be
counterproductive in the longer term. Moreover, it is not in the spirit of the Museums
Association’s own Code of Ethics.
According to the Museums Association Code of Ethics (2008),
Museums belong to everybody. They exist to serve the public. They should enhance the quality of
life of everyone, both today and in the future. They are funded because of their positive social,
cultural, educational and economic impact (clause 2.0).
It goes on to say that museums should strive
to reach out to audiences and to increase access to their collections (3.0),
to make collections more accessible (3.11), and to
develop mechanisms that encourage people to research collections (9.4).
Levying charges for research on collections can hardly be consonant with increasing access or
encouraging research. Moreover, charging is likely to impact most on the youngest generation of
scholars, those just beginning to explore the world of research. In this generation lies the future of
any discipline and, were charges to become commonplace, there is a grave risk of atrophying the
growth of artefact studies which have only in recent years regained momentum in the UK.
We believe that imposing charges also acts against the interests of the museums themselves. Active
hands-on research creates a two-way process. Museums and their staff provide the facilities to
study material in their care, as well as offering depth of knowledge about that material. In return,
research at all levels gives a pay-back both informally at the point of study and more formally
through the publication of new ideas and syntheses. That pay-back, in the form of specialised
knowledge in an increasingly specialised and compartmentalised discipline that no single curator can
keep abreast of, helps shape the content and presentation of future museum displays and any
related outreach and education activities.
Even setting aside our ethical objections, commercialisation of this two-way relationship would,
logically, result in researchers charging museums for any information provided, in whatever form
and at whatever stage. Commercialisation is patently not a workable or desirable outcome in a
discipline that takes great pride in its rejection of proprietorship over and financial valuation of
knowledge about the past – it is, after all, our shared common heritage.
The Prehistoric Society, Institute of Archaeology, UCL, 31-34 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PY, UK
www.prehistoricsociety.org I prehistoric@ucl.ac.uk
Registered charity (no. 1000567) and Company limited by guarantee (no. 2532446)
The principle of free access to bona fide researchers should, in the Society’s opinion, apply across
the board, irrespective of level of research, whether the material to be studied is artifactual or
archival, or where the material is housed. While the fragility of some material may necessitate
imposing restrictions on direct handling by researchers, even these should not be treated as special
cases in terms of access ethics. We foresee only one exception to the principle of non-charging,
that of large projects with major funding which may impose particularly heavy burdens on one or
more museums. In such cases it may be reasonable to expect a fee to be agreed and built into the
funding proposal. Having appropriate and sufficient curatorial staff is clearly vital to service this
crucial means of furthering our knowledge of the past. We urge museums to make all efforts to
ensure adequate staffing levels and to maintain a policy of free research access to collections.
The President and Vice-Presidents on behalf of the Council of the Prehistoric Society
5 March 2015
Dr Alex Gibson, President
Dr Stuart Needham, Professor Bob Chapman, Christopher Evans, Dr Josh Pollard, Vice-Presidents
The Prehistoric Society, Institute of Archaeology, UCL, 31-34 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PY, UK
www.prehistoricsociety.org I prehistoric@ucl.ac.uk
Registered charity (no. 1000567) and Company limited by guarantee (no. 2532446)