Tag: data

Picturing Museum Data

A dendrogram with a circle showing all museums at the centre and the types of institutions to which they disperse collections

We are currently developing visualisations of our data on the whereabouts of collections from closed museums. This is proving complex because graphs, figures, or flow diagrams are never just a simple representation of information. And that problem is compounded when the data itself is patchy and sometimes imprecise. In this post we want to discuss some of the choices we made about modelling that information.

To recap, around 525 museums in the UK have closed since 2000 and we have been investigating what happened to their collections. That information has been entered onto a spreadsheet with almost two thousand lines of information. It is nearly impossible to get a grasp on the data by simply reading it through, so we create visualisations to capture and summarise different aspects of that information. We want to better understand where objects moved from and where they have gone; the issue was how best to visually represent that information.

The first figure we used is known as a dendrogram (dendron means ‘tree’). The circle in the middle stands for all closed museums and the others stand for the recipients. This gave us a quick and striking indication of the sheer variety of destinations – objects moved from museums to heritage organisations, railway preservation societies, schools, mining companies, private individuals, and even airports. It was colour coded to help us differentiate between different kinds of entities: those in the public or private spheres, the third sector, and universities (which are not a neat fit with the others). We also labelled the lines or ‘edges’ with the number of transactions made, so we can see that there were sixteen transactions from closed museums to dock management companies and twenty-seven to auction houses and the lines are thicker where there were more transactions. (Please note that the data collection is not yet finished so the numbers are not yet final. Our focus here is on modelling, not the data contained within the visualisations).

This dendrogram was very general, so we filtered the data by museum characteristics, including governance, museum size, and subject matter. Figures 2 and 3 show the distribution of objects from closed local authority and independent museums, respectively. These figures also showed instances where objects had made more than one ‘jump’, for example moving from a closed museum a local authority and thence to a library or historic house.

A dendrogram showing local authority museums at the centre and the types of organisations to which they disperse objects around the edge — Figure 2. Dendrogram representing collection dispersal from UK museums 2000-24: pathways starting from closed Local Authority museums

A dendrogram showing all independent museums at the centre and the types of organisations to which they disperse objects at the edges — Figure 3. Dendrogram representing collection dispersal from UK museums 2000-24: pathways starting from closed independent museums

These figures were useful because they showed the differences in the patterns of closure according to governance. We could quickly see that objects from independent museums went to a much wider range of destinations than those from local authority museums. However, we wanted to be able to make more direct comparisons: to see the museums of different types and their destinations alongside each other.

Our next step was to create alluvial diagrams, which are used to show flow and change over time. In Figure 4 the bar on the left represents the different types of closed museums, the columns on the right represent recipients, and the ribbons between them indicate the flow of objects from one to the other. The lines are coloured by source, and the actors are grouped by governance and economic sector.

A flow diagram with types of museums in the left column, and the types of organisations to which they disperse objects in the centre and much smaller right hand columns — Figure 4. Alluvial diagram representing collection dispersal from UK museums 2000-24: Size of block calculated by number of transactions

So far, so good. The problem now lay in how to better represent the quantities of objects flowing out of the closed museums, and that was a much more difficult issue because it concerned the precision and detail of the available data. In some cases, we knew that a museum’s entire collection was transferred to another institution. In the spreadsheet this is logged as a single transaction: when museum X closed, all the collection went to Y. In other cases – often transport museums – we had extremely detailed information about the individual items in a collection and where they went. We wanted to capture all the information we possibly could, so each itemised transaction is included in the spreadsheet. For instance, Clarke Hall Educational Museum made transfers to sixteen recipient organisations whereas the collection from Manor House Museum was moved wholesale to the Moyse Hall Museum in Suffolk. In Figure 4 the size of the coloured blocks in the bars and the width of the ribbons relate to the number of transactions, so the sixteen transactions from Clarke Hall occupy more visual space than the single transfer from the Manor House Museum, irrespective of the size of the collections. This was an unsatisfactory solution.

To complicate matters further, some of the information we received was far less specific. It was common for stakeholders to say things like ‘some of’ the collection went to a local museum, ‘a few things’ to the town hall and ‘everything else’ went to the school. These are clearly relative measures and depend on how big the collection was in the first place. ‘Most of’ one collection may be roughly equivalent to ‘a bit’ of another. And it is rare to be able to establish the size of a collection, even when the museum is open. How then were we to model the data we had received?

The project team devised a work-around. We estimated the relative size of transactions using the formula: (museum size x collection size), with museum size being the midpoint of the categories used in the original Mapping Museums research (small = 5,000; medium = 30,000, and large = 500,000 visitors per year) and collection size being quantified as (few = 5%; some = 25%; half = 50%; most = 80%; all = 100%). National and local authority museums tend to be larger and as you can see in Figure 5, transactions of collections starting in national or local authority museums tend to have thicker ribbons than those starting in independent museums.

Figure 5 was an improvement, but there were still problems. Firstly, the figure gave no indication of how many museums were involved in these transactions and second, there was no way to visually convey the uncertainty of the data. Third, the alluvial diagram created visual continuity between very different entities: national museums, private museums, and airports all occupied the same neatly bounded space, implying connections or similarities which did not necessarily exist.

A network diagram with types of museums in the left column, and the types of organisations to which they disperse objects in the centre and much smaller right hand columns — Figure 6. Network diagram representing collection dispersal from UK museums 2000-24 (pathways move from left to right)

It was time to try a different tack, so we started experimenting with network diagrams. The lines represent flows of objects between actors and move from left to right. Closed museums are represented by circles on the left, recipient organisations in the middle, and any further destinations on the right. Using a network diagram helped solve the problem of visual continuity. It also enabled us to plot the number of museums involved and the size of the transactions and to register a degree of uncertainty: the size of the circles indicates the number of museums or recipients, while the line between is both labelled with actual numbers and uses an additional band to show the estimated sizes of those transactions. Using the network diagram, it became possible to make statements such as:

‘We know of 55 local authority museums which closed during this time. We know that there were 45 transfers of ownership from closed local authority museums to other local authority museums. We think that these transfers involved a relatively large quantity of objects’.

So far this seems to provide the best solution to modelling our data, but it is still work in progress and we welcome any comments.

Fiona Candlin and George Wright

November 2024

Tags data, visualisation

Museum Closure in the UK Research Process

Getting stuck with museum closure research

Post author By Mark Liebenrood
Post date 14th October 2024
No Comments on Getting stuck with museum closure research

A brick wall — Photo by Joakim Honkasalo

We’ve been working on our project about museum closure for just over a year. We set out to collect information about the collections of around 500 closed museums, and our stated ambition was to cover at least 70% of them. Some of our team had prior experience of researching closed museums and knew that details were often hard to come by, so that target seemed realistic. A year on, we’ve done much better than expected. Of our initial list we have found information on over 90%.

What remains is a list of what we’re calling the stuck museums. In these cases we think we’ve exhausted our avenues of enquiry, and still don’t have information on what happened to the collections.

What have we tried? An incomplete list: Googling; meeting members of the Museums Development Network; contacting local history societies, who often had leads but sometimes knew no more than we did; asking nearby museums; consulting local authority planning documents that indicate the change of use of premises; examining auction catalogues; searching newspaper archives; for one case visiting the National Archives and for another two, the archives of British Telecom; searching social media; picking the brains of the Arts Council’s Accreditation team; using the Wayback Machine; when no contact details existed bar a postal address for directors of the small company that ran the museum, writing letters – an unusual activity in 2024; making Freedom of Information requests to local authorities when informal enquiries went unanswered; joining specialist groups on Facebook for collectors of paperweights, Matchbox cars, and antique dolls, to name just three.

That’s not all. We’ve also tried: asking members of the Subject Specialist networks; emailing the foremost writer in English on the work of a Japanese novelist; contacting organisations that used to run the museums or who now occupy the site; having obtained snippets of information, more precisely targeted Googling; interviewing specialists in regimental and transport museums; emailing local politicians, drinks manufacturers, race courses; attempting to contact a retired magician; using a website that lists the destinations of former military aircraft; seeking help from the unofficial historian of a major football club; interviewing the biographer of a man who ran two shipwreck museums; asking local libraries; reading council reports and collection development policies; asking the police (about police museums); meeting an expert on recent local authority museum closures; emailing hospitals; writing to the BBC; asking former curators, a local board of education, the National Trust, auction houses; interviewing outgoing curators.

This may sound exhaustive (and exhausting). We’ve been as thorough as we can, yet for some museums we remain stuck, with little or no information on what happened to the museums or their collections.

Can you help us with any of them? We’re looking for information on why the museums closed, what happened to their collections, and what their buildings are now used for, if they still exist.

View the list of stuck museums.

If you have any information, please contact Mark Liebenrood at m.liebenrood@bbk.ac.uk.

Mark Liebenrood

Tags data, data collection, lost museums

Museum Closure in the UK

Trains, planes, and automobiles – how much do we know about where collections go?

Post author By Mark Liebenrood
Post date 15th May 2024
No Comments on Trains, planes, and automobiles – how much do we know about where collections go?

Multiple electric locomotives and rolling stock. A shed is visible on the right hand side. — The Electric Railway Museum in 2012. Photo: Fairfaithfull on Wikimedia Commons

The Mapping Museums Lab have been collecting data on over 450 closed museums, including what happens to their collections and buildings. As we gather information about collections, we’re learning that the data available varies widely from one museum to another. In some cases we’ve obtained a list of where every exhibit went, with the type of destination (such as a museum or private storage facility), and sometimes the state of repair of individual objects. In other cases, we have gathered little more than that the collection was sold, often at auction, and dispersed into private hands.

We’re in the relatively early stages of a two-year project, but some patterns are already starting to emerge. For instance, legal processes can have the effect of producing better public documentation for collection dispersals. Liquidators managing company insolvencies produce annual reports, which detail the disposal of assets, and a set of those reports were produced when the parent charity of the Yorkshire Waterways Museum went into liquidation. A more controversial example is the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, where accusations of impropriety led to numerous news reports that documented the complex trajectories of some of the exhibits. Although Bristol Museums now look after the bulk of the collection, the whereabouts of some items formerly held by the BECM are still unknown.

The type of object displayed can make a big difference to the amount of information available. Museums of aviation and railways, which in the cases we’re looking at often display a fairly small number of large objects, are particularly well documented. One example is the Electric Railway Museum, which was a collection of locomotives, electric multiple units and related items, sited near Coventry. The museum’s founder kindly supplied us with a detailed list of the whereabouts of the collection, and the ownership status of each object.

The collections of closed aviation museums can also be fairly straightforward to track. Each plane, in addition to having a manufacturer and model, also has a unique identification number that enables its whereabouts to be found. I have never needed to visit the Demobbed website before starting this project, but that database of former military aircraft has proved invaluable in tracking down some of the planes that were held by now-closed museums. Demobbed features extensive lists of aircraft locations maintained by the Wolverhampton Aviation Group, who are evidently a dedicated community of enthusiasts. Each plane’s history is detailed, including whether parts of it, such as nose cones, were removed and dispersed.

Museums featuring ships and boats have also been relatively easy to track. The small collection of five ships and submarines once held by the Warship Preservation Trust in Birkenhead has been exhaustively documented. This is partly due to a museum and a heritage organisation acquiring two of the vessels. But thanks to enthusiasts keeping an eye on the others, documenting them online and sometimes campaigning for their preservation, we know that a submarine and the frigate HMS Plymouth were scrapped, while the last known destination of the minesweeper HMS Bronington was a dock in Birkenhead, where it had partially sunk at its moorings.

But for another maritime collection there is more uncertainty about destinations. The large collection of boats at the Eyemouth Maritime Centre was sold at auction in 2017. The sale attracted a fair amount of attention from boating enthusiasts, which means that we have been able to track the destinations of quite a few of the boats. However, around 100 boats were reportedly purchased by a collector and cut up to enable transportation to China. This shipment was apparently intended for a new maritime museum but we don’t know whether it ever opened, leaving the whereabouts of a substantial part of the Eyemouth collection unknown.

Warships and a U-boat moored in Birkenhead Dock. — Warships Preservation Trust. Photo: Chowells on WikiMedia Commons.

Although planes, trains, and ships have been easy enough to track down in many cases, car and motorcycle museums are another matter. So far, we’ve found that many of these collections go to auction and are subsequently dispersed to private buyers. Occasionally it’s possible to discover that some items have gone to museums, but not always which ones. The auctioneers of the London Motorcycle Museum told us that three of the bikes had been purchased by museums, but our enquiries have not revealed precisely where they went. The case of the Cars of the Stars museum, mentioned in a previous blog, where the collection went to just one buyer who also runs a museum, appears to be quite unusual. As the destinations of auctioned items are rarely reported, that type of museum dispersal is often the end of the trail for us.

A tug painted in bright blue and yellow moored at the dockside. — Wheldale at Yorkshire Waterways Museum in 2005. Photo by George Robinson on WikiMedia Commons.

As our research continues, it’s becoming apparent that although some collections are very well documented, sometimes down to the level of individual items, in many cases we are simply recording groups of items as moving from a closed museum. And it’s unfortunately quite likely that we will never know what has happened to many others, with the destinations of items and even whole collections left unrecorded. Those differences in what we can find out have implications for how we analyse our data. We don’t want to over-represent some collections in our analyses simply because we have more details about them, or under-represent others that are less well documented. As a team we’re continuing to discuss how best to grapple with that problem.

Mark Liebenrood

Tags collections, data, data collection, museum closure

Museum Closure in the UK

Museum closures and deprivation

Post author By Mark Liebenrood
Post date 29th April 2024
No Comments on Museum closures and deprivation

A road sign partly covered in faded stickers, attached to black metal railings. A road with a double yellow line is visible behind

Are museums more likely to close in areas of higher deprivation? It seems an obvious question. The more deprived an area is, the less capacity the council has for raising revenue from business rates and council tax, and the more likely it is to have to cut non-statutory services, such as museums. Meanwhile independent museums in deprived areas might struggle due to the lack of disposable income. Except that turns out not to be the case.

In the last blog we considered closure according to region, which provided us with an overview of museum geography in the UK. In this blog we take a more granular approach and draw on the Index of Multiple Deprivation. This is the official measure of relative deprivation in the UK and is assessed on a combination of household income, employment, education, health, crime, barriers to housing and services, and living environment. Using the index allows us to look at deprivation in relation to small areas with around 1,500 residents apiece, which then enables a more nuanced understanding of where museums are located and the types of places where closure occurs. Deprivation is calculated differently in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, making comparisons difficult, so in this blog we focus only on England.

Table 1 shows the distribution of open museums across England as of the beginning of 2024. They have been classified according to governance and the deprivation of the ward in which they are located. As you can see, all kinds of museums can be found in almost all areas – irrespective of deprivation. There are no national museums in the least deprived areas and no university museums in the most deprived, although both these types of museums have relatively small numbers. Most notably, private, and independent (not for profit) museums cluster in the middle ground, while local authority museums tend towards the most deprived.

Table 2 shows change in the number of museums since 2000 and gives the percentage change in each category. As we outlined in our previous blog the number of independent (not for profit) and private museums rose since 2000. Here we can see that the expansion in numbers of not-for-profit and private museum goes across the spectrum of deprivation with large growth in the middle.

The number of Local Authority museums has decreased since 2000 but there has been less decrease in the middle ground. There has been a greater decrease in the number of Local Authority museums at the edges of the spectrum, that is in areas of most and least deprivation.

There are two important caveats to this data. Firstly, the Index of Multiple Deprivation does not equate to average affluence or poverty. Rather it looks at most and least deprived, which is slightly different. So for instance, one area may contain pockets of extreme wealth and considerable deprivation, whereas another may be less affluent but also have little deprivation in the sense that residents are all in employment, there are low rates of crime, and so on. According to the Index the first area is more deprived – there is some deprivation amid the wealth – while the second is less deprived.

The second caveat is that a museum’s location is not synonymous to the visitor catchment area. These small areas represent the immediate geographic context in which a museum is sited and visitors may come from much further afield. The degree to which they do so depends in part on the type of museum in question; whether it is a national, regional, or small local museum. Going forward we will be thinking further about calculating the distribution of museums and change according to the visitor catchment area.

Yet despite the caveats, the data shows that change in the sector does not neatly align with levels of deprivation. We cannot link museum closure to deprivation or indeed growth in numbers to a lack of deprivation.

Fiona Candlin
George Wright
Andrea Ballatore

_{Photo: Katy Pettit}

Tags data, deprivation, location, museum closure

Museum Closure in the UK

New data on UK Museum Closure 2000–2024: Governance and region

Post author By Mark Liebenrood
Post date 20th March 2024
2 Comments on New data on UK Museum Closure 2000–2024: Governance and region

At least 467 museums have closed in the UK since the beginning of the millennium.¹ For organisations that aim at keeping their collections for posterity that figure may seem high, but it is important to realise that for most of the past twenty-four years, more museums have opened than closed. The sector is still bigger now than it was in 2000. The more pertinent question is which types of museums have closed and where? Are parts of the sector thriving while others struggle? When did they close: are we on an upwards or downwards trajectory or is the sector flatlining? Over the next few months, we’ll address all these questions. In this blog we’ll concentrate on governance, looking at the differences between governance types, and if those are nuanced with respect to region.

Table 1 shows that around 138 independent (not for profit) and 152 private museums definitely closed during the period under study. Those numbers are far outweighed by openings. Since 2000 some 418 independent (not for profit) and 209 private museums have opened, which more than offsets the numbers of closures. There are far fewer university and national museums, but like not-for-profit and private museums, their overall numbers have also risen. Twelve university museums have closed and eighteen opened, and three national museums or additional branches have closed with eleven openings. In terms of overall numbers at least, the private and independent (not for profit) museum sectors have collectively managed to ride out waves of austerity, the pandemic, and the cost-of-living crisis. The same is not true of local authority museums, 145 of which have closed with only 72 opening, a loss of 73 museums.

It is easier to grasp what is happening in the museum sector if we frame openings and closures in terms of percentage change. That approach takes the numbers of closures and openings for each group of museums into account and judges them against the total number of museums in that category. Looking at Table 1 we can see that the overall number of independent (not for profit) museums has risen by a substantial 22%, private and national museums by around 13%, and university museums by 7%. In stark contrast, the change for local authority museums is -9%.

So where exactly are these museums opening and closing? Table 2 shows us that growth among independent (not-for-profit) museums, has been spread across all the nations and English regions regions most notably Wales, Scotland, and the East of England. Conversely, the number of Local Authority museums has decreased in all regions, the exception being Northern Ireland (where the museum sector has consistently had different patterns of growth and closure to the rest of the UK). The dropping numbers of Local Authority museums is the most worrying aspect of museum closure over the last twenty-four years. Scotland lost by far the most local authority museums, with a drop of seventeen since 2000, that is, 12% of its total. However the situation is perhaps more troubling in London which lost nine local authority museums, a decrease of 22%, the largest in the UK. Although the capital is well served by national museums, they are mainly located in the centre of the city and serve a national and international audience, whereas the Local Authority museums are mainly in the outer boroughs and are usually conceived as a service for the neighbourhood.

We also want to point to the areas that have low growth among independent museums and have simultaneously lost a higher proportion of Local Authority museums – particularly the North West. In these areas, the overall levels of museum provision, and hence the benefits that they may provide in terms of access to public space, informal education, culture, and just pleasure, are being correspondingly reduced.

In our next blog we will be looking at social deprivation and exploring the issue of closure and access to museums in more detail. Please subscribe to receive further posts on our work in progress and new findings.

Fiona Candlin and George Wright

A note on numbers:
In most cases, we have a definite year for museum closure. In some cases, we have a date range. For example, we may know that a museum closed at some point between 1995 and 2005 but cannot determine exactly when. In these instances, we calculate the probability of it having closed after 2000 and factor that information into the analysis. That can lead to some slight discrepancies in the totals, for instance when one number is rounded down and another rounded up. Apart from the headline number of 467 definite closures since 2000, all the data reported in this post are based on probabilistic estimates. Our best estimate of the total number of closures is 534. ↩︎

Tags administrative geography, data, governance

Lab News Publications

Mapping Museums data used by ONS

Post author By Mark Liebenrood
Post date 15th March 2024
No Comments on 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.

Tags data, ons

Lab News

Funding success for the Mapping Museums team

Post author By Mark Liebenrood
Post date 19th June 2023
2 Comments on Funding success for the Mapping Museums team

Wooden packing cases of different sizes with stencilled text and labels stand in front of a blank wall

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)

Tags data, museum closure, museum history, research

Research Process

A week in the life

Illustration of a man sitting in an attic room at a desk. The desk is piled high with books and he is reading one of them. A window is open behind him.

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

Tags data, data collection, local history, methodology, research

Lab News Publications

The Mapping Museums Website and Database is Now Live

Post author By Mark Liebenrood
Post date 17th March 2020
No Comments on The Mapping Museums Website and Database is Now Live

First Flight of Space Shuttle Endeavour Launches -- May 7, 1992

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

Tags data, database, publicity

Publications

New publications

Four red double decker buses in a row inside a garage

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

Tags articles, data, database, surveys