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]
- 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.
- 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 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.
- 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.
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 ownershipand 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 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 long-term. 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.
- 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 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 non-national 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.