What is a small museum? Or for that matter a medium or large museum? In the museum sector, size is generally measured in relation to visitor numbers, and in cases where several criteria are used, such as income or staff numbers, they are still taken into account. The Mapping Museums research team has followed suit […]
Visitor numbers provide some sense of the scale of a museum’s operations. If a museum has a large collection of priceless artefacts, occupies an impressive building, has professional curators and conservators, a nice café, and offers activities to its audiences, then it is unlikely to attract a mere 2,000 visitors per year. Conversely, if a […]
The Mapping Museums project is coming to the end of its second year. To mark the half way point of the research, this blog provides a brief update on some of the work so far. Finalising the data Early this year, Dr Jamie Larkin, the researcher, completed the main phase of data collection. We are […]
How do researchers manage when they have missing data? One of the initial aims of the Mapping Museums project was to establish an authoritative dataset of all the museums open between 1960 and 2020, and to record information on their location, governance, accreditation status, subject matter, opening and closing dates, and visitor numbers. Having this […]
In the process of compiling a list of all museums in the UK from 1960 until 2020, the Mapping Museums team have collected data from previous surveys and sources. As I discussed in previous blog posts, we found that surveys had excluded art galleries without collections, and to a large extent, unaccredited museums. Historic buildings […]
Can you help us to evaluate the Mapping Museums web application? Mapping Museums is a large-scale research project that is based at Birkbeck, University of London. It aims at documenting at analysing the development of the museum sector between 1960 and 2020. So far, the team has collected a rich range of data on approximately […]
The Camera Museum began life as a cafe before being established in 2012 by Patrick and Adrian Tang, displaying Patrick’s growing collection of cameras. The display includes a timeline of cameras from the 1800s to the present. The sign makes reference to the nearby British Museum. Photo by Jamie Larkin.
The Bournemouth Transport Museum was a collection of public transport vehicles on display to the public each summer, probably from the late 1970s. It was later known as the Bournemouth Heritage Collection. Some of the vehicles were returned to commercial service in the early 1990s. The collection changed hands and locations a number of times […]
The Folk Museum, now known as the Gloucester Life Museum, is housed in Tudor timber-framed buildings. One of them is traditionally associated with the last night of John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester, who was burned for heresy by Queen Mary in 1555. The museum tells the social history of Gloucestershire and includes a […]
Some museums are well documented, while others can be rather elusive. A case in point is the Big Four Railway Museum in Bournemouth, about which we know very little. According to one source it housed a collection of railway locomotive name plates belonging to the enthusiast Frank Burridge and was open in the 1980s. As […]
