Four red double decker buses in a row inside a garage

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 […]

Defining Museums

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. […]

Getting Started: Compiling the Data

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 […]

Problems with the Data

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 […]