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 […]
Surveys of museums and galleries have always excluded galleries that do not have permanent collections. In 1963 the Standing Commission for Museums and Galleries conducted a review of the UK museums sector. Its authors stated that they would exclude national institutions, but otherwise they would try ‘to cover all museums and galleries with a permanent […]
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 […]
Since 1960, which is the starting point for the Mapping Museums research, UK museum professionals have used five different definitions of museums. It was surprisingly difficult to track down this information so in this post I provide a list of past museum definitions and a brief commentary about their relevance to the Mapping Museums research. […]
The Mapping Museums project aims to identify trends in the growth of independent museums from 1960 to 2020. In order to conduct our analysis we need to be able to interrogate longitudinal data for a number of museum variables, including years of opening and closure, size, and status change. At present, no such database exists […]
When I first began this research I had assumed that there was very little data on the museums that were founded in the late twentieth century. In fact, the contrary is true. A great deal of information has been collected about museums from the 1960s onwards. By our reckoning there were at least nine major […]
