Categories
Lab News Publications

Mapping Museums data used by ONS

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) used Mapping Museums data in a new analysis of public access to sports facilities, supermarkets and museums.

Of museums, they write:

Urban areas, in particular large cities, have fewer museums relative to their population than rural areas. Seven of the ten local authorities with the fewest museums per 100,000 people in the UK are London boroughs. Those local authorities with the higher proportion of museums tend to have small not-for-profit local history museums.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/articles/moreadultsareactiveinareaswithahighernumberofsportsfacilities/2024-03-07

The new release includes a report and four datasets, including the number of museums across Local Authority Districts (LAD) in the United Kingdom.

Categories
Lab News

Funding success for the Mapping Museums team

We are pleased to announce that the Arts and Humanities Research Council has awarded £1million to the Mapping Museums research team for their project ‘Museum Closure in the UK 2000-2025’.  

The new research will use trans-disciplinary methods to analyse closure and collections dispersal within the UK museums sector. Its aim is to examine the geographic distribution of closure, to better understand types of closure (e.g., whether museums are mothballed or disbanded), and to document the flows of objects and knowledge from museums in the aftermath of closure. We will investigate the afterlife of collections, find out if museum exhibits are scrapped, sold, stored, or re-used, and examine ‘outreach’ and temporary museums. A Knowledge Base will be designed to model and store the collected data, and visualisations and analyses of the data will be developed. Above all, we aim at critically reassessing notions of permanence and loss within the museums sector.  

‘Museum Closure’ is based at Birkbeck, University of London and at King’s College London, and will run for two years, beginning in October 2023. It is led by Fiona Candlin, Professor of Museology, who will be working with co-investigators, Dr Andrea Ballatore (King’s College London), a specialist in cultural data science, Alexandra Poulovassilis, Emeritus Professor in Computer Science, and Peter Wood, Professor in Computer Science. The post-doctoral researcher is Dr Mark Liebenrood (museum history) and we will be recruiting a second post-doctoral researcher in data science.

(Image modified from original, by elston on Flickr)

Categories
Research Process

A week in the life

What does the Mapping Museums research assistant do all day? I sometimes wonder where all the time goes. Although the vast majority of the four thousand-odd museums listed in the database were added before I really began work on the project, I’ve added well over a hundred new museums and made corrections to the entries for hundreds more. But how do we find out about museums that were not already in the database, and where do all the amendments come from? Here I offer a peek into a ‘typical’ week.

Monday

A friend of the project reports on Twitter a possible new museum she’s spotted while on a bike ride. It turns out that it is not new, but the small private museum has slipped under the Mapping Museums radar, so I add it to the database. Another contact has suggested we check a directory of railway preservation sites to make sure we haven’t missed any railway museums during our searches. I order it from the British Library for my next visit.

Tuesday

I have Google news alerts set up in the hope of spotting museums closing and opening, and I open my email this morning to find an alert for a new museum. All too often these alerts don’t produce anything useful, but on this occasion they have. A new private museum dedicated to the footballer Duncan Edwards has opened above a shop in Dudley, in the West Midlands, so I make a note to add it to the database.

The Mapping Museums database is constantly being updated. When we receive new information for museums currently open, we update our records accordingly. Today I find that a curator has supplied updated details for their museum using the form for editing data, and process the update so that the details are added to the database.

Wednesday

At the British Library for my own PhD research, I also look at the railway preservation directory. At first sight it looks somewhat daunting, as it lists hundreds of railway preservation sites in Britain opened from the 1950s onwards, classified into thirteen types. Each one of these will potentially need to be checked against the database to see whether museums need to be added. I copy the pages I need for processing later.

Looking through copies of Museums Journal I see mention of another museum that I’m not familiar with. It’s in the database, but the news item gives extra information about the museum’s governance that we didn’t have, so I make a note for later.

Sometimes we need to contact museums directly to confirm information, and recently I have been trying to get hold of the administrator of a small military museum in Scotland (the museum came to our attention as part of a list supplied by a liaison officer for regimental museums). The administrator is only on site occasionally, and so far I have missed him each time I’ve called. I miss a call while sitting in the library’s reading room, and when I return it later I have just missed him, but his colleague supplies his email address. By email he confirms the nature of the collection, but does not know when the museum was first opened – he has been in the post for less than two years. One thing I’ve discovered doing this research is that it is quite common for the opening date of museum not to be known by those who run it. A museum’s foundation date is often tacit knowledge, which can easily be lost as staff change. The database currently contains almost five hundred museums for which we do not have a certain opening date, and we record them as date ranges instead based on the best information available.

Thursday

I resume work on a list of museums that another contact has provided us with. They are all in North East England. Not all of them qualify as museums in the way that the project defines them but many do, and for whatever reason some have been overlooked. Small private museums are easily missed, and it would not be possible for the project to have compiled as comprehensive a list as it has without the benefit of local knowledge. One example is the Ferryman’s Hut Museum in Alnmouth, which I add to the database.

Friday

The opening date of a museum is proving elusive. My enquiry to the owners remains unanswered, so I resume searching online. Eventually I track it down in the Gloucestershire volumes of the Victoria County History, an incredibly valuable local history resource.

It’s fortunate that that museum was recorded, but what do you do when a museum has long closed and there are no references to be found online, no matter how hard you search? Well, you might descend the archive.org rabbit hole. As anyone who has followed references in Wikipedia may have noticed, website links stop working all the time – a phenomenon colloquially known as ‘link rot’. The Wayback Machine preserves websites for posterity, keeping copies of those still online as well as many that have long since vanished. In this case we knew that the museum had closed thanks to an estate agent’s website, but when did it open? The website for the tower in the Scottish Borders had fortunately been captured by the wayback machine, and while there was no definitive information about the museum, there was enough to allow a range of dates for the museum’s opening to be recorded.

It’s the end of another week of data collection and checking. That list of hundreds of railway preservation sites will have to wait until another time …

Mark Liebenrood

Categories
Lab News Publications

The Mapping Museums Website and Database is Now Live

Well it’s not the launch we’d hoped for. We were supposed to mark the event with a panel discussion and wine reception at London Transport Museum, and for weeks I’ve been looking forwards to hearing what the speakers had to say about our report. I’ve been borderline worried about the possibility that we might have overlooked something important or that there would be an error in the database that had hitherto gone unnoticed, and I’ve imagined us all afterwards, happily drinking wine at the reception, toasting each other for our success. We had 120 delegates booked in, coming from all kinds of interesting places, and a long waiting list. I’d even bought a new outfit. Sigh. It is disappointing but given the current spread of Covid-19, it was better to err on the side of caution and to postpone the event.

On the up side, we have decided to go ahead and publish. So, if you have had to self-isolate and need some alternatives to Netflix, then there is a cornucopia of museum information just waiting for you.

www.mappingmuseums.org

The website has links to podcasts and lectures, to a series of academic articles, and to transcripts of dozens of interviews with the founders of museums. It’s got sections on how we collected the data and built the database, on our definitions of museums and our new subject classification system. Above all, there is the database: information on 4,200 museums that have been open at some point between 1960 and 2020. If you’ve always wanted to know where to find museums of food and drink, or how many railway museums there are in the UK, then the answer is now at your fingertips.

We have also published ‘Mapping Museums 1960-2020: a report on the data’, which provides a summary of the research and of our methods, and a guide to the findings from the data. This is where you’ll find information on the numbers of museums that have opened in the UK over the last six decades, when they opened, the subjects they covered, their governance, where they were, and if they closed. The report can be accessed through the Publications page.

I do hope that you will enjoy the website, and find the report and database useful. If you have any feedback on the project, and especially on how you’re using the information, then do please let us know.

Fiona Candlin

Image: First Flight of Space Shuttle Endeavour Launches — May 7, 1992, by NASA under Creative Commons licence

Categories
Publications

New publications

Mapping Museums articles are like buses. You wait patiently for ages, and then three come along at once. We’ve provided the abstracts here and any interested readers can click on the links below for a full text copy.

Understanding and Managing Patchy Data in the UK Museum Sector

Fiona Candlin and Alexandra Poulovassilis

It is well accepted that the museum sector has a longstanding problem with data collection and management. This article begins by exploring problems with gaining access to data, poor archiving and coverage, and the absence of data. We then explain how the Mapping Museums research team set out to remedy the lack of longitudinal data on the UK museum sector in the period between 1960 and 2020. Initially we collated and supplemented existing information on UK museums but it was impossible to fill some gaps or resolve some inconsistencies in the data. Here we discuss how we designed a database that was sensitive to the patchiness of the material, and that could model uncertain and absent data in computational terms. To close, we briefly comment on how our data enables research on museum history and on how the problems with data collection in the sector might be remedied in the longer term.

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/8BXPW7CUQ3IMXXQGS7D7/full?target=10.1080/09647775.2019.1666421

The Missing Museums: Accreditation, surveys, and an alternative account of the UK museum sector

Fiona Candlin, Jamie Larkin, Andrea Ballatore, and Alexandra Poulovassilis

Surveys of the UK museum sector all have subtly different remits and so represent the sector in a variety of ways. Since the 1980s, surveys have almost invariably focused on accredited institutions, thereby omitting half of the museums in the UK. In this article we examine how data collection became tied to the accreditation scheme and its effects on how the museum sector is represented as a professionalised sphere. While is important to understand the role of surveys in constructing the museum sector, this article also demonstrates how the inclusion of unaccredited museums drastically changes the profile of the museum sector. We outline the inclusive research methodology of the Mapping Museums project team and compare our findings with those produced when a survey is limited to accredited museums. In so doing, we sketch out an alternative, heterogeneous version of the UK museum sector and make recommendations based on that evidence.

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/CRDWGTPUIC2FQFYXYWYT/full?target=10.1080/09548963.2019.1690392

Creating a Knowledge Base to Research the History of UK Museums through Rapid Application Development

Alexandra Poulovassilis, Nick Larsson, Fiona Candlin, Jamie Larkin, and Andrea Ballatore

Several studies have highlighted the absence of an integrated comprehensive dataset covering all of the UK’s museums, hence impeding research into the emergence, evolution, and wider impact of the UK’s museums sector. “Mapping Museums” is an interdisciplinary project aiming to develop a comprehensive database of UK museums in existence since 1960, and to use this to undertake an evidence-based analysis of the development of the UK’s museum sector during 1960–2020 and the links to wider cultural, social, and political concerns. A major part of the project has been the iterative, participatory design of a new RDF/S Knowledge Base to store data and metadata relating to the UK’s museums, and a Web Application for the project’s humanities scholars to browse, search, and visualise the data to investigate their research questions. This article presents the challenges we faced in developing the Knowledge Base and Web Application, our methodology and methods, the design and implementation of the system, and the design, outcomes, and implications of a user trial undertaken with a group of experts from the UK’s museums sector.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3343871?download=true

Categories
Lab News

Two Years On: An Update

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 continuing to make changes to the dataset as new museums open and existing museums close, and we’re still trying to hunt down some missing opening and closing dates, so it remains work in progress. Nonetheless, we now have information on almost 4,000 museums that have been open at some point between 1960 and the present day.

Evaluating the knowledge base

Alongside data gathering, we have designed a knowledge base that allows users to browse, search, and visualise the data in nuanced and precise ways, and which we described in our last blog (See: Managing Patchy Data). As part of the design process, Professor Alex Poulovassilis, the co-investigator on the project, and Nick Larsson, the Computer Science researcher and developer of the knowledge base, organised a series of trials to evaluate the knowledge base. These provided us with valuable feedback and we responded by making changes to how the material is presented and navigated.

We got enormously positive responses at the most recent user trial in Manchester in July. Having lived and breathed the research for the last two years it was very encouraging to hear Emma Chaplin, director of the Association for Independent Museums, call it the “museums equivalent to YouTube” and say that she could while away hours browsing the material; to know that staff from Arts Council England thought that it was “intuitive  to use”; and generally that the trial participants assessed it as a being a useful resource for them in their roles and for others in the sector.

Analysing and publishing the findings

Having finished the data collection and the main phase of developing the knowledge base, we have been able to start analysing the data. These initial analyses will be the basis of a series of articles, and over the summer, the team has been working on four publications:

  • ‘Mapping Museums and managing patchy data’ examines the reasons why data on the museum sector is so incoherent, how the project sought to remedy that situation, in part by building a system that acknowledges uncertain information.
  • ‘Where was the Museum Boom?’ looks at the massive expansion of museums in the late twentieth century and asks whether or not the boom took place across the UK, or if there were regional variations.
  • ‘Creating a Knowledge Base to research the history of UK independent museums: a Rapid Prototyping approach’, covers the computer science research that underpins the conceptualisation and construction of the knowledge base.
  • ‘Missing Museums’ deals with the recent history of museum surveys, considers the focus on professionalised museums, and asks what the sector looks like when we factor in unaccredited museums.

Brief versions of the first and second of these papers were also presented at conferences: Digital Humanities Congress at Sheffield University and Spatial Humanities at Lancaster University, both of which took place in September, and we hope that the full versions of all four articles will be published within the next academic year. We’ll let you know when that happens.

The process of analysing data has been greatly helped by having Dr Andrea Ballatore join the team early in 2018. Andrea is a Lecturer in GIS and Big Data Analytics in the Department of Geography at Birkbeck and he is leading the statistical analysis within the project. He has also made invaluable contribution to developing the knowledge base, particularly with respect to mapping the data.

The Mapping Museums Team

Categories
Research Process

Modelling Patchy Data

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 material would provide the first step in constructing a nuanced, evidence-based history of the development of the museum sector during the period, and so the research team began to compile information from numerous sources: surveys conducted by government bodies, by the Association of Independent Museums, and the Museums Association; lists of museums held by the national organisations for the arts; guidebooks; and websites. The researchers also got in touch with dozens of tourist boards and local history groups, and hundreds of curators and volunteers to follow up leads or information. All this material was cross-checked within the team, and then reviewed by experts from the Museum Development Network.

We now have a rigorously researched list of museums in the UK from 1960-2020. Even so, there is still a considerable amount of missing data. When the first phase of data collection was finished we had identified almost 4,000 museums and had established the following coverage of their key attributes:

  • Museum opening dates: 88%
  • Museum closing dates: 6%
  • Governance: 92%
  • Visitor numbers: 67%

The question then was, how were we to represent and model the missing dates, governance, and visitor numbers within our analysis?

At the same time as collecting data, we started to build a knowledge base that allows users to explore. The system is designed so that users can browse in a structured way through the categories of accreditation, governance, location, size, subject classification, year of opening and year of closing, and see the results on a map or in a list view. Alternatively, they can submit a detailed search that allows them to filter results by combinations of the categories above, or they can generate visualisations of how the different types of museums have emerged over time and create tables showing how the various categories inter-relate. At any point, it is possible to scrutinise the details of individual venues.

One option for dealing with missing information was to exclude museums with missing data from the relevant searches. The problem with that approach is that incomplete data tends to be associated with small, unaccredited museums or with museums that have since closed and so excluding them on this basis would bias our analysis in favour of extant established museums., which would be counter to the purposes of the project as a whole. Thus, when we could not identify a museum’s governance, we assigned it a value of Unknown. The advantage of an explicit Unknown category is that the missing data is made apparent, and the problem of data patchiness is exposed rather than hidden.

We took a different approach to opening and closing dates because we often had rough information about these rather than no information at all – for example, we might know that a museum had closed at some point in the 1990s. This approximate information would be lost if we just categorised a date as ‘unknown’. Therefore, we decided to use a date range of the form (earliest possible year, latest possible year) to capture imprecise knowledge about museum opening/closing dates. These date ranges are used in different ways across the different facilities provided by our system:

  • In the Browse facility, we take museums’ opening/closing dates to be the mid point of the specified date range.
  • In the Visualise facility, event occurrences are ‘spread’ equally over a date range. For example, if a museum is known to have opened between 1965 and 1969, then the count of one museum opening is spread over that time period (i.e. a count of 0.2 is assigned to each of the five years 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969).
  • In the Search facility, the user has the option of searching by definite dates so that the results exclude all the museums with date ranges attached, or by possible dates, in which case the results include museums where the date range intersects with the specified period. This allows for a much more nuanced analysis.

Looking in more detail at how Search works, opening and closing dates are stored as a pair of years (f,t) in our database, where f and t may be the same year if we know the year of opening/closing for certain.  So, for example, the pair (1965,1969) would be stored for a museum known to have opened between 1965 and 1969; and the pair (2011,2011) would be stored for a museum known to have closed in 2011. Modal Logic operators are supported by our system’s Search facility that allow the user to query whether a particular museum definitely or possibly opened/closed in a given year.  In particular, suppose a given museum ‘m’ is recorded as having opened in year ‘f’ at the earliest and year ‘t’ at the latest.  Suppose a researcher wishes to find out whether museum m opened before, on, or after a specified year ‘d’.  Then the following comparison operators are supported by our system to allow the researcher to determine whether this is definitely the case:

Comparison operator Implementation logic
(f,t) = d  DEFINITELY ON A SPECIFIC YEAR f = d  and t = d
(f,t) < d  DEFINITELY BEFORE t < d
(f,t) <= d DEFINITELY BEFORE OR INCLUDING t <= d
(f,t) > d  DEFINITELY AFTER f > d
(f,t) >= d DEFINITELY AFTER OR INCLUDING f >= d
(f,t) != d DEFINITELY APART FROM t < d OR f > d

 

And the following comparison operators are supported to allow the researcher to determine whether this is possibly the case:

 

Comparison operator Implementation logic
(f,t) = d POSSIBLY ON A SPECIFIC YEAR f <= d AND d <= t
(f,t) < d  POSSIBLY BEFORE f < d
(f,t) <= d POSSIBLY BEFORE OR INCLUDING f <= d
(f,t) > d POSSIBLY AFTER t > d
(f,t) >= d POSSIBLY AFTER OR INCLUDING t >= d
(f,t) != d POSSIBLY APART FROM not (f=d and t=d)

 

The same comparison operators are available for interrogating closing dates.

We employed a further strategy for visitor numbers, which is the least complete category and has discontinuities that make it difficult to compare like with like.  Our primary objective was to use visitor number data to provide an indication of the size of the museum and, given the patchiness of the information, we decided to have a category of Unknown and also to gross numbers into size categories of Large, Medium and Small, where large and small also have sub-categories. This approach enabled us to include data from the Association of Independent Museums and Arts Council England who generally provide visitor number ranges rather than precise figures, and to use predicative analysis to establish broad size ranges. It also allowed us to circumvent some of the methodological problems of having figures collected by different means and from across the decades. Users can browse or search according to these size categories, and in addition, they can search according to precise date-stamped visitor numbers where available.

In conclusion, in the Mapping Museums project we have managed data patchiness in a variety of ways: designing a flexible knowledge base that can be modified and added to as required; representing absence rather than ignoring unknown information; using date ranges and providing users with the option of searching by definite or possible dates; and apportioning the probability of an opening/closing event occurrence over the estimated time interval for statistical analysis. Rather than implying that all visitor numbers data are of equal reliability, we created size categories for a large number of museums, and provided the means to search the definite but incomplete data that was available.

Fiona Candlin, Alex Poulovassilis
September 2018

Categories
Events

Participate in our web application evaluation sessions!

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 4000 UK museums, and we have developed a web application that enables users to browse, search, and visualise that information.

The evaluation session is an important means for us to gain feedback about the usefulness of the web application. With your input we can further improve the system before it is made publicly available.

We’d like a wide variety of people to participate in the evaluation trial especially those that are involved in the museum and archive sectors, in academia, or in digital media

The trial session will be based on three activities:

  • A hands-on introduction to the web application.
  • Using the application to undertake a small number of information searches. This will allow us to gauge how easy the system is to use.
  • Group discussion about your experience of using the system and the ways that it could be improved and extended.

The session will take no more than two hours.

There is more information about the project available at http://mappingmuseums.wpengine.com/about/.

Locations and dates:

2 – 4.30pm | October 3rd 2018 | Room 407, Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX (the entrance is on Torrington Square)

We would be very grateful for your assistance. If you would like to participate, please email the project director at f.candlin@bbk.ac.uk briefly explaining why you would like to attend. We can cover travel expenses up to £20.

Researchers involved in the trial session

Researchers and contact details:

  1. Professor Fiona Candlin (candlin@bbk.ac.uk)
  2. Professor Alex Poulovassilis (ap@dcs.bbk.ac.uk)
  3. Nick Larsson (nick@dcs.bbk.ac.uk)

How the data will be handled in the study

Information obtained from you through the session will be used to inform the research work of the project and subsequent research publications. All personal data collected from this study including your name and contact details will be kept confidential. No reference will be made in oral or written form that could link any participant to information they have provided to us as part of this the study.

Your participation in this study is voluntary, and you may withdraw from the study at any time.

Categories
Research Process

Surveying museums: What’s in and what’s out?

We began the Mapping Museum research by investigating the numerous surveys and reviews of UK museums that have been compiled since the 1960s. Our intention was to use that material as the basis for our own dataset, but it gradually became clear that the various government and charitable bodies who had conducted the surveys or collated the lists did not always include or exclude the same venues. They all had subtly different ideas of what a museum was.

Clearly, the motivations for surveying museums vary depending upon the remit of the association or body that is conducting the survey. If a review is focused on state support then there is little reason in spending time and money investigating independent museums, art galleries without collections, and examining regimental collections would be pointless if the survey is meant to look at the role of university museums. It is not that the surveys have been inaccurate, or that we should advocate for a more perfect overview, rather that they are designed for particular purposes within specific contexts. Even so, the selectivity of a survey does matter, especially when they concern museums in general. In adopting one set of terms over another, or in deciding that a particular category of venues do or do not fall within their purview, surveys diverge in how they constitute museums. They have each understood museums to be slightly different entities, and this has an impact on how they portray the sector as a whole.

In this and the next two posts I will consider some of the types of venues that have been included or excluded from surveys, and as they are the main focus of our study, I will begin with independent museums.

 

Independent museums: In or Out?

In 1963, the Standing Commission stressed that they had considered ‘museums run by every sort of authority’. They listed local authority museums, those run by the Ministry of Public Buildings and works (which later became Historic Buildings Commission, then English Heritage), military, school and university museums and finally ‘privately-run museums’ of which a few belong to commercial firms, some to local learned societies, and almost all the rest …. are administered by trusts’. At this stage, who ran the museums, under what governance, and with what degree of professionalism, was less important than the fact they were a museum, and what constituted a museum was not raised as a question. Surveys conducted in the 1970s and 1980s were similarly inclusive but that situation had changed by the 1990s.

The shift in approach was motivated by an increasing emphasis on professionalization and specifically accreditation. In 1971 the Museums Association proposed a voluntary accreditation scheme, which would set basic standards in the sector. In order to be accredited, museums had to comply with the association’s benchmarks and with their definition of a museum. Responding to the plan, which was presented at the Museums Association Annual General Meeting, one speaker observed that many small independent museums would find it difficult to meet the first essential minimum requirement, namely, that they had sufficient income to ‘carry out and develop the work of the museum to satisfactory professional standards’. More than that, the accreditation process introduced a definition of a museum for the first time, and as the speaker also commented, it referred to museums as institutions, which the small independent venues were not.

Initially accreditation was voluntary and was run in a relatively ad-hoc way, but in 1984 it was taken over by the Museums Libraries Archives Council and became more closely connected to funding. Museums had to be accredited in order to qualify for public support and so membership of the scheme became increasingly ubiquitous. It also began to be used as the basis for surveys and lists. DOMUS, which was the most comprehensive survey of museums in the UK, only included accredited institutions and omitted an estimated 700 non-accredited museums. At one point the DOMUS team did consider the possibility of including non-accredited museums and of generating a more comprehensive view of the sector but it came to nothing, not least because the survey data was gathered in tandem with the annual accreditation returns, and so there was no process for collecting information on these additional museums.

The situation, wherein small independent museums did not meet the requisite standards and therefore were largely absent from official data, was exacerbated when the definition of museums changed in 1998. The new definition added a legal stipulation, which was that museums had to keep their collections ‘in trust for society’. Again, this concerned the contract between museums and the public because establishing museums as trusts helps ensure that collections are not sold or used for private gain, which is especially important when funding is involved. The result was that from this point onwards any museums that were run on an ad-hoc basis with little official governance, were constituted as commercial enterprises, or were owned by families, individuals, or businesses, ceased to appear in official data. Likewise, museums that did meet the terms set by the Museums Association definition, but had decided not to seek accreditation fell off the official lists.

The Museums Association definition works well as an aspirational target or a guide for professional practice, but it does not describe museums in the world at large. Similarly, accreditation is a useful means of ensuring some accountability with respect to public funding, as is the stipulation that museums should have particular modes of governance. National funding bodies do need to keep track of the museums that have been accredited and are eligible for state support. Nonetheless, using accreditation as a mechanism for collecting information about museums has resulted in a skewed view of the sector. Surveys are structured in such a way that they can only encompass museums that have achieved a particular level of professionalization.

To draw an analogy, imagine that a professional association of musicians declared that music needed to be made within a certain legal context and to be of a certain standard in order for it to count as such. The outputs of community choirs, folk musicians, pub bands, would no longer qualify as music unless they had established themselves as trusts. Yet, in the case of museums, such a definition has been widely adopted and implemented. The museum equivalents of pub bands do not appear in official surveys. In consequence, they do not figure in accounts of the sector or to a large extent in academic histories of museums. It is, as if museums only operate within the sphere of official culture.

Interestingly, some unaccredited museums appear in the Museum Association Yearbooks and more recently on their online Find-a-Museum Service. Although the Museums Association has been one of the main drivers in setting standards and establishing definitions of museums, they are also reliant on membership fees for income. Anyone who pays to join can submit their details, and the Association do not police entries according to their own criteria, since that would result in a drop in revenue. There is some irony in this situation. The Museums Association’s work on establishing definitions has resulted in smaller museums being excluded from official consideration but nonetheless its publications and website are among the few places where non-accredited museums are listed. The Mapping Museums team has used and is greatly extending that data on unaccredited museums, and will be publishing lists of museums in general, not just those that meet professional criteria.

 

© Fiona Candlin November 2017

Categories
Research Process

Picking the Brains of the Museum Development Network

There is a limit to how much information can be unearthed online or from an archive. Over the last year, the Mapping Museums research team has compiled a mammoth list of museums that were open in the UK between 1960 and 2020. We have used various sources to cross check their details, but there are some particulars that can be hard to find or verify. And so, we asked the Museum Development Network for their assistance.

The Museum Development Network consists of twelve groups, one apiece in Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, and one in each of the nine regions of England. Although the groups all function slightly differently, they all support accredited museums, advise on the accreditation process, and provide relevant information to Arts Council England and other national organisations. They also allocate their own grants, run projects, and help improve services and their members’ skills. In doing so, the museum development officers quickly acquire a fine-grained knowledge of their local museums. We wanted to refine our data by tapping their expertise.

With the support of Claire Browne, the network chair, we arranged to visit staff in each country or region. On each occasion, we arrived with a list of the museums of that area and slowly worked our way through the data, line by line. We had asked the museum development officers to look out for any information that we may have missed and they pointed to a number of instances where the local authority had transferred responsibility for a museum to an independent trust. They also noticed some duplicate entries that had resulted when a museum’s name had been changed, and spotted instances when museums had moved premises, amalgamated with neighbouring venues, or had recently closed. We deleted or edited the entries as appropriate.

The Museum Development Network helped us fine-tune our data and they also contributed to our research by helping us classify museums according to their subject. In most cases, the main topic of a museum is fairly obvious: as one might expect, the Lapworth Museum of Geology concentrates on rocks of varying types, while the Bakelite Museum has a collections of plastic, but the theme of a museum is not always so self-evident. For example, Carnforth Station provided the set for Brief Encounter, and its Heritage Centre focuses on the film, not on railways or trains, while the Deaf Museum and Archive in Warrington is more concerned with the community than with health or medicine. Being familiar with these venues, the museum development officers could make a nuanced judgement as to their overarching subject matter, whereas the research team would have to spend a considerable length of time checking webpages, catalogues, and other sources to make a judgement. Their input saved us weeks of work. It was also good to establish that our new classification system worked smoothly, although the absence of a ‘social history’ category did cause some consternation. For us, the problem with ‘social history’ is that it applies to such a large number of venues that it lacks nuance. In the DOMUS survey, conducted in the 1990s, almost a third of museums were listed under this category, which makes it almost unusable for research purposes.

Holding the meetings served to further refine our data, and it also had benefits for the museum development network. Many of the officers said that they rarely got an opportunity to discuss the museums in their region, and that it was useful to do so. Others thought that going through the list was akin to a quiz on their museums, and had been fun. Almost everyone commented that the Mapping Museums team had identified numerous museums that they had never encountered, and that our data would inform their work, particularly with respect to unaccredited museums.

Ultimately, the experience was incredibly productive. It was a pleasure to meet such a dedicated and knowledgeable group of people. We are very much looking forward to the point when we can provide them, and others, with the completed data.

© Fiona Candlin October 2017