Museums Association
Collections Inquiry 2004
Interim report of the working group on the use of collections
This paper represents the views of a Museums Association working group, which met
in spring 2004. The group was asked to consider how museum collections are used in
the broadest sense and to explore how they might be put to better use in future. 1
1. Background
We started from the perspective that radical change is needed to ensure that the
potential of museum collections is harnessed for the future. We took the view that
people do not currently have enough opportunities to engage with the full richness
and diversity of UK museum collections. Too many collections are unused or are
effectively unusable at the present time: not displayed, not researched, not
documented in accessible ways, and not understood. Unless museums take urgent
steps to change this situation, too much of the huge and growing body of UK museum
collections will be a burden, not an asset, for museums of the future, draining
resources without feeding the imaginations of museum users.
This paper summarises the group’s ideas about the future use of museum collections.
We explored the key intellectual themes addressed by contemporary museums and
looked at museums’ key activities, in order to determine whether there was a
mismatch between what museums were trying to do and the tools with which they
were trying to do it – their collections. This report goes on to explore the key principles
that we believe should determine how museums use their collections in future. If
universally adopted, these principles would change museum practice in significant
ways; the paper finishes with some suggestions about the impact we think this
paradigm shift would have on practice. These are still very much in outline. We
believe it is important that the profession makes serious decisions about the principles
relating to the use of collections, before the ideas about how this can be put into
practice are further developed. We intend to make clearer recommendations in this
area after the consultation period, when we have the profession's view about the
areas most in need of change.
2. Using collections: themes and approaches
The museum experience is founded on a triangular relationship: museums bring
together collections, knowledge and ideas, and people. If anyone of these three
facets is missing, then museums lose their essence. Collections have to be central to
users’ experience of museums. Museums should ensure that all their initiatives to
broaden the appeal of museums and to encourage new audiences are rooted in the
collections. We believe that people who work in museums are sometimes
unnecessarily hesitant about promoting the collections to new audiences. Museum
professionals have regular, privileged access to museum collections and so they
forget how powerful they can be. Their work should be about harnessing that power.
A great strength of collections is that they are adaptable to many different purposes.
They can offer emotional, reflective or didactic experiences. They can enable users to
1
A full list of group members is given at the end of this report.
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explore complex ideas or simple facts. And they can offer different insights and
experiences to different people simultaneously.
Collections can tell many different stories but it is possible to identify broad themes
which are key to museums now and are likely to remain important. The range of
themes that museums explore determines not only what they collect, but also how
those collections are used. We believe that the fundamental themes that museums
address are people and places.
People – identity and the other
Museums give people opportunities to develop a sense of their own identity and their
place in the world. Identity has been an important theme for museums in recent years;
many have taken steps to ensure that people from diverse backgrounds are able to
see their identity reflected in museum collections. Museums also help people to
understand the “other”: that is, people removed from them by time, place or culture.
This role is important in an increasingly fragmented and ideologically contested world.
Museums offer tangible evidence that there are other ways to live and make other
people’s lives real.
Places – the locality and the world
Museums give people opportunities to understand the world around them, the natural
and built environment of their immediate locality and of the wider world. As the world
becomes increasingly homogenous, museums can record what is distinctive about
the local environment and maintain a sense of local identity. As economic
developments lead to changes in work patterns and ways of life, museums can record
passing traditions. Museums have always had the aim of offering people chance to
understand the world beyond their immediate environment. As the climate changes,
as species are lost and as environments are transformed, museums record what is
passing for the future. Museums can also empower people to deal with change in the
world around them, by offering opportunities to understand and engage with it.
Although often founded out of nostalgia or a sense of loss, at their best, museums
can help to shape the future.
3. Key Principles
We believe that museums need to reassess the key principles which underpin their
practice. We suggest that a re-evaluation is needed in the following areas.
Ownership
In principle, most museums do not own their collections; they hold them in trust for the
public. In practice, the museum sector does not act out the implications of this;
museums’ approach tends to be proprietorial, rather than custodial. They decide
whether or not to loan objects to other museums on the basis of their own display
priorities. They effectively limit access to objects, displaying some, putting others in
stores that only a few people can access, intellectually or physically. They publish
limited amounts of information about their collections, keeping other information in
private filing systems or inside curatorial heads. They are not open to other people’s
opinions or information about their collections.
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We suggest that museums should rethink their approach to their collections, taking
seriously the idea that they are jointly owned by everyone. This would have
implications for a whole range of areas of museum practice. Museums have become
much more democratic institutions in recent years, taking steps to promote access for
a wider range of audiences. If museums really believed that their collections were not
their own but were shared public property, this would have to go much further.
One step towards this would be for museums to work much more closely together and
to share their collections more generously, in order to provide the widest possible
range of opportunities for the public to engage with their collections. If museums can
see their collections as a common resource, it will help to encourage a wider sense of
public ownership.
Intellectual ownership and knowledge
Museums traditionally maintained intellectual control of their collections; that is, they
determined what objects meant, perhaps allowing selected outside experts to act as
occasional interpreters. In recent years, in part in response to post-modernism,
museums have started to recognise that other people have stories to tell about
objects in their collections and that different objects can mean different things to
different people. There has been some enthusiasm for letting users take intellectual
ownership of collections, perhaps allowing them to help select objects for exhibitions,
or to contribute their own stories to the museum’s web site. At the same time as this
ideological shift, there has been a decline in traditional curatorial knowledge.
Collectively, museums simply know less about their collections that they used to. This
has left curators unsure where they stand, whether they should aspire to be experts
or a simple channel through which others’ knowledge can flow.
We believe that the move towards a more open intellectual approach is a positive
one. Museums cannot be the source of all knowledge about objects in their
collections. However, museums should be more than a simple clearing house for
ideas. There is still a thirst among museum users for authoritative knowledge and
informed opinion. Museums can act as brokers for other peoples’ ideas and
knowledge, bringing different viewpoints and sources of information together.
However, they have responsibility to “add value” and to provide facts, as well as
communicate ideas. The public looks towards museums as a source of expertise and
museums should not be hesitant about embracing this role. Museums should
celebrate their capacity to be authoritative, without being authoritarian.
Museums need to take their responsibility to care for information and develop
knowledge as seriously as their responsibility to care for their collections. Expertise is
too often seen as a luxury. Museums are often very unsystematic in their approach to
archiving information and reluctant to allow outside experts to contribute their
knowledge. Museums need to put a higher priority on developing knowledge and
sharing it with others.
Accessibility
We believe that there is a need to further refine our thinking about museums’
relationship with their users. We suggest that we should move away from thinking in
terms of access and start thinking in terms of engagement. The recent move towards
increasing access has given us more open and attractive museums, but the notion of
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access can be somewhat limiting. The bemused visitor looking at a bit of broken old
pot in a case with an incomprehensible label has “access” to it. The visitor who has
“engagement” with it perhaps understands some of the things that that bit of pot tells
them about the world they live in and about the people who lived in it before them, or
could be simply moved by its beauty or intrigued by its strangeness. We believe that
everything that museums do should start from the premise that people have a right to
engage as fully as possible with the objects in their care. Museums need to cater for a
wide range of needs and expectations. They need to provide different ways into their
collections for people with different kinds of knowledge and different learning styles.
They also need to be open to the ways that all kinds of specialists will want to use the
collections: artists, enthusiasts, academics, family historians.
Permanence
We suggest that museums have, in the past, collected for the future without enough
thought as to what that means. Museums need to redefine what they mean by
collecting for the future and take a more nuanced approach to collecting for the longterm. They perhaps need to move away from an approach based on permanence, to
one based on sustainability. The constantly expanding museum is unsustainable, if
museums are really to be institutions which will last for all human history.
Instead, museums may have to develop a more evolutionary approach to their
collections. We suggest that there is a need for a full debate about the place of
deaccessioning in the long-term development of museum collections. The profession
needs to determine whether museums will need to deaccession more actively than
they currently do; we also need to engage the public in this debate. We suggest that
museums should initially build on subject specialist networks, sharing information
about who holds what and perhaps concentrating some material in centres of
expertise. However, sharing collections and knowledge in this way will not solve the
problem of the over-abundance of certain kinds of material and a more radical shift
may be required.
Museum collections feed off people’s curiosity and it may be that people’s curiosity
about some subjects is time-limited. For example, many local museums very actively
collected objects associated with declining industries in the 1970s and 1980s. People
who worked in mining before the 1984 strike, for example, want to see that history
reflected in museums. Their children and grandchildren will want to see it too. And
some people will want to see it in 100 or 200 years time: but surely fewer. At some
point, museums may simply need less of what they have in order to satisfy the
curiosity of their users.
Many museum professionals’ reluctance to debate deaccessioning openly comes
from a fear that a more open approach to disposal will leave local authority collections
in particular vulnerable to depredation by governing bodies keen to raise funds. This
fear may not be entirely unfounded and we suggest that if museums do set out to
develop more open approaches to deaccessioning, this should be accompanied by
the development of a new legislative framework. This could offer non-national
museum collections a similar level of protection to national collections, and at the
same time make transfers between institutions easier.
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4. Implications for areas of practice
The suggestions made in this section are very tentative. It is our intention to develop
them further once the consultation process has identified in what areas people
perceive change as being needed.
Ownership
We suggest that museums should find ways of increasing their users’ sense of
ownership of their collections and should improve their accountability. Perhaps as a
minimum all museums could be obliged to display information about how many
objects they had, how many of them were displayed and what other opportunities
there were to engage with other parts of the collection. This might help to counteract
any complacency about the way that public collections are used.
We also suggest that museums should move towards seeing their collections as a
common resource and build on subject specialist networks to share knowledge and
make connections between collections held in different museums.
In our discussions, we have explored the idea of developing a clearer distinction
between specialist and generalist collections. Specialist collections would include
large amounts of material not on display - and which might not be suitable for display
– whereas generalist collections would be primarily for display. Museums could move
towards this by gradually transferring collections to specialist centres, freeing
resources in the generalist museums for much more engaging public programmes.
Before recommending this, a much fuller debate would be needed. The physical
relocation of collections may not be necessary or desirable, given better use of ICT.
However, better information about what is where certainly is a priority.
Engagement
We suggest that the museum community as a whole should assess the impact of
some of the newer ways of promoting engagement with collections, before investing
in them further. For example, there has been a move towards building open stores but
it remains unclear how much meaningful engagement a visit to a store really offers.
Similar assessment of the value of loans to non-museum venues, online exhibitions,
handling collections, etc, is also needed.
Public and private – breaking down the barriers
We suggest that it may be helpful for museums to develop closer relationships with
private owners. Museums may not need to own everything of significance for their
subject themselves. Conditional exemption already provides a way of protecting
objects in private ownership and it would be possible for museums to provide
registers of significant material, and to protect and interpret it, even though it
remained outside their ownership. This approach would have the potential to be
excessively bureaucratic and might not provide many meaningful opportunities for
engagement with the objects concerned. But private individuals and groups do have a
role to play in preserving material culture. Just as archaeologists’ relationship with
metal detectorists has moved from one characterised by mutual suspicion and
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hostility to a much more collaborative and positive one, thanks to the Portable
Antiquities Scheme, so museums need to find ways to shift their relationship with
private collectors to a more positive footing.
A new legal framework for collections
As indicated above, we suggest that it would be worth investing in a study into the
possible benefits of new legislation which would improve the protection of nonnational museum collections, and make it easier to undertake transfers.
Governance of museums.
We believe it is essential that museums are as open as possible in promoting public
use of their collections. This should include offering the opportunity for people to
engage fully with decisions about the way that museums and their collections are
managed. To achieve this, museums may need to the way that they are governed,
such as making boards more representative, and take their responsibility to consult
with their users more seriously.
Expertise
As discussed above, we suggest that museums need to rebuild their own expertise
where this has been eroded, and to find ways of drawing on external experts’
knowledge. The museum community needs to build on existing subject specialist
groups and strengthen the networks which promote knowledge sharing. Museums
also need to strengthen their relationships with universities and other external sources
of expertise.
At the same time, we believe that museums must reassert their role as experts, able
to provide authoritative information and be less apologetic about this.
Digitisation
We suggest that proper evaluation of the large-scale digitisation projects that have
been undertaken to date is essential. There is startling little evidence about how
museum users engage with digitised collections. Museums should clearly allow more
access to information about their collections, but it maybe that cheaper online
catalogues are as useful a resource as complete digitised collections. Museums
should come to a collective view about the best way forward in this area.
The care of collections
Museums have been reluctant to prioritise collections care, at least publicly, in recent
years, partly because of pressure from the government and funders to prioritise
access. Museums need to be more confident about asserting the importance of
straightforward collections care.
We have discussed the idea that museums should grade their collections, according
to vulnerability or importance, in order to prioritise collections care. This idea is
attractive in many ways, but there is clearly a danger that it could become a
bureaucratic exercise, of little benefit to museum users.
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Deaccessioning
One of the key things to gauge in the consultation process will be the profession’s
current attitude towards disposal. We suggest that museums may need to undertake
more deaccessioning in order to make themselves fit for purpose in the future.
However, we are mindful of the danger that this could be a distraction from more
immediate and more easily achievable priorities. We have chosen not to make any
practical recommendations in this area, until we have a better sense of the current
mood.
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Members of the working group
Mike Houlihan, National Museums and Galleries of Wales (chair)
Sarah Blackstock, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery
Kathy Gee, MLA West Midlands
Alison Hems, MLA
Suzanne Keene, UCL
Karen Knight
Pat Reynolds, Surrey Museums
Hedley Swain, Museum of London
Caroline Worthington, York Museums Trust
Museums Association staff in attendance:
Caitlin Griffiths, Ethics Adviser
Javier Pes, Editor of Museum Practice
Helen Wilkinson, Policy Officer
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