Tag: independent museums

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Events

AIM! I’m going to map forever…

Last week the Mapping Museums team attended the Association of Independent Museums (AIM) annual conference hosted at Chatham Historic Dockyard. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the foundation of AIM, which itself gives a good indication as to the moment when the growth of independent museums began to gather pace. As our project is working to map historical trends within the independent museums sector, the conference gave us the perfect opportunity to talk to colleagues with a long and deep involvement with independent museums and to meet those who had recently joined the organisation.

More specifically, we attended the conference for two reasons. The first was to create greater awareness of our project, which we hoped would help forge connections among both professionals and those responsible for running individual sites. The second was more prosaic; we aimed to actively gather data from delegates over the course of the two-day event and put more museums on the map!

Publicising the project

The main method of communicating Mapping Museums was a lecture as part of a session on partnerships between universities and museums. The project’s Principal Investigator, Professor Fiona Candlin, provided an overview of our project, emphasising that the museums sector currently lacks comprehensive data, and that our research would chart the growth of independent museums in relation to a host of cultural, political and economic factors.

Professor Fiona Candlin addressing attendees of the AIM conference

 

The lecture was well attended and this exposure led to both  conversations with sector staff who approached the project team later in the day and a significant increase in activity on our Twitter feed (@museumsmapping). These interactions were helpful for a few reasons. On the one hand we were able to discuss forms of practical help for the project and establish new contacts. But for the most part it was reassuring to exchange stories about the difficulties we face with issues like defining museums and knowing that these are shared problems (and frustrations!) across the sector.

It was also useful to talk to subject specialists about issues particular to their museums. Chatting to a delegate responsible for historic windmills about whether they should be counted as museums, she offered her insight that they should so long as their primary operating revenue came from visitors, rather than auxiliary uses such as producing artisanal flour. Meanwhile, delegates from a historic ship talked to us about whether it should be referred to as a museum or as a visitor attraction, and the difficulties of mapping some vessels that could be moored in different locations.

A highlight of the conference was the opportunity to meet Rob Shorland-Ball, a long-time AIM member and museum consultant who was responsible for depositing the AIM archive at the University of Leicester. By doing so he has been instrumental in helping us to record around 200 (often closed) museums that we have found looking through this material, and which we may not have located otherwise. It was great to inform him about the project and thank him for his efforts. Such interactions, particularly with historical data collection, have helped to humanise the research.

 

Delegates helping with the data collection

In terms of the practical matter of collecting data at the conference, we did this by manning a stall in the exhibition hall. Here delegates could come and talk to the project team, check to see if their museum was in our database and add (or amend) their entry if not. In particular we were eager for delegates to tell us if museums were open or closed, and to give us an idea of their subject matter. The benefit of this was that experts – people ‘on the ground’ working at these museums– could corroborate, and add to, our data.

To make the process as easy as possible we created A3 paper catalogues of our database with entries listed in alphabetical order. This meant that delegates could easily browse entries and had enough space to make additions We also had our computer database on hand in case of any problems in finding museums (for example, if the Barnstaple Museum was recorded as the Museum of Barnstaple).

AIM delegates helping with our data collection

 

In addition to this, we also had on show a prototype of our computer mapping model, demonstrated by Nick Larsson, the project’s computer science researcher. The benefit of bringing the model (and we needed to a substantially reconfigure a laptop to do so!) was that visitors could experience the whole of the research process; once they had checked their entry they were able to see how the data would be visualised and its functionality, and thus think about how they could use such a resource once it is finalised.

The vast majority of the delegates that we spoke to were very enthusiastic about the project and some returned to the stall with their friends to encourage them to participate. As a result, delegates made additions to data over 60 entries and offered suggestions of museums were hadn’t heard of. As a result, we are now aware of the John Lewis Heritage Centre, the Christchurch Tricycle Museum (1984-1999), and the Wigston Folk Museum (1981-1990)! We were also given names of regional experts and offers of help to map museums at a local level. Indeed, despite the cutting-edge technological aspect of the project, our ability to collect (often obscure) information is still largely reliant on traditional forms of networked knowledge; an old fashioned form of crowdsourcing.

New data!

 

Overall, the conference was a success on a number of fronts. Our project is much more visible as a result and we have a trove of data and helpful regional contacts. Beyond these tangible outcomes, the most encouraging aspect of the exercise was to be realise that we are working as part of a sector of professionals who have a great deal of enthusiasm for a project detailing museum history, and who are willing to do as much as they can to help add to this knowledge.

 

© Jamie Larkin          June 2017

Categories
Research Process

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 that would allow us to do so. Ironically, for a sector committed to the preservation of cultural memory, documenting the institutions that participate in these activities is seemingly much less of a priority (see ‘Problems with the Data’ post). Thus, the first objective of the project was to create a functional database that catalogued all of the museums that have existed in the UK since 1960.

Before we began building this database we first considered the logistics of the process, namely the point during our timeframe when it would be best to begin to collect the data. Should we put together a snapshot of the nation’s museums as of 2016 (estimated at 2,500 at the outset of the project) and work backwards, or begin with a baseline of around 900 museums that existed in 1960 and work forwards? The former would give us a solid foundation but might require tortuous weaving back through name changes and amalgamations; the latter would give us fewer museums to start with, but might be easier as we attempted to record individual museum trajectories.

The solution was a compromise based on time and the availability of data. Between 1994 and 1999 the Museums and Galleries Commission ran a programme that produced the Digest of Museum Statistics (DOMUS). It involved annual reporting from museums that participated in the scheme in the form of  lengthy postal surveys. The information captured included address, registration status, visitor numbers and many other characteristics. While some limitations with the data have been highlighted in retrospective analyses (specifically by Sara Selwood in 2001), the baseline data that DOMUS provided was sufficient for our needs.

Using this as a starting point enabled us to begin with detailed information on nearly 2,000 museums. This snapshot of the museum sector in the late 1990s provided us with the flexibility to work both forwards and backwards in time. In particular, having records of museums at an interstitial stage of their development has been helpful in tracking (often frequent) changes of name, status, location and amalgamations.

The major problem with the DOMUS survey was accessing the data and formatting it for our use. After the project was wound up in 1999 the mass of information it had generated was deposited at the National Archives. However, given the complex nature of the data, there was no way of hosting a functional (i.e. searchable) version of the database. Consequently, it was archived as a succession of data sheets – in a way, flat-packed, with instructions as to how the sheets related to one another.

The first task was to reassemble DOMUS from its constituent parts. This meant trying to interpret what the multiple layers of documents deposited in the archive actually referred to. While the archival notes helped, there was still a great deal of deductive work to do.

Once we had identified the datasheet with the greatest number of museums to use as our foundation, the next step was to matchup associated data types held in auxiliary sheets into one single Excel master sheet. To do so we used the internal DOMUS numbers (present within each document) to connect the various data to create single cell data lines for each individual museum. We slowly re-built the dataset in this way.

In some instances the splitting of the data – while presumably logical from an archival perspective – was frustrating from a practical standpoint. A particularly exasperating example was that museum addresses were stored in a separate sheet from their museum, and had to be reconnected using a unique numerical reference termed ADDRID. While the process was relatively straight-forward, there was always a degree of anxiety concerning the integrity of the data during the transfers, and so regular quality checks were carried out during the work.

The next step was to clean-up the reassembled sheet. Firstly, we removed anything from the data that was not a single museum (e.g. references to overarching bodies such as Science Museum Group). Second, we reviewed the amassed data columns to assess their usefulness and determine what could be cut and what should be retained. Thus, old data codes, fax numbers and company numbers were deleted, while any information that could potentially be of use, like membership of Area Museum Councils, was retained. We also ensured that the column headings, written in concise programming terminology, reverted back to more intelligible wording.

This formatting helped shape the data into a usable form, but the final step was to put our own mark on it. Thus we devised specific project codes for the museums, which was useful for recording the source of the data and managing it effectively moving forwards. To tag the museums we decided on a formula that indicated the project name, the original data source, and the museum’s number in that data source (e.g. mm.DOMUS.001). Once our database is finalised, each entry will be ascribed a unique, standardised survey code.

Ultimately, the DOMUS data has acted as the bedrock of our database. It provided a starting point of 1848 museums and thus the majority of our entries have their basis as DOMUS records (which have been updated where applicable). One of our initial achievements is that the DOMUS data is now re-usable in some form, and this may be an output of the project at a later date.

A wider lesson from this process is the importance not only of collecting data, but ensuring that it is documented in a way that allows researchers to easily access it in the future. When our data comes to be archived in the course of time, the detailed notes that we have kept about this process – of which this blog will form a part – aim to provide a useful guide so that our methods and outputs can be clearly understood. Hopefully this will allow the history of the sector that we are helping build to be used, revisited, and revised for years to come.

© Jamie Larkin June 2017

Categories
Research Process

Not Knowing About Museums

There is a lot that we don’t know about museums. In an age when it is possible to download an institution’s annual reports and follow their exhibitions and events via social media, it seems unlikely that academics, museum professionals, and the museum-going public would be so uninformed about the recent history, characteristics, and scope of the sector. That situation seems doubly unlikely if we note the growth of audit culture, in which public venues are required to account for themselves to taxpayers and policy-makers, and trebly so when we consider the vast scholarship on museums. And yet it is the case. This situation is not limited to museums in developing nations. It equally applies to America and Western Europe. Granted, these areas contain tens of thousands of museums, but even at the smaller scale of the UK, which is the focus of this research, our overview of museums is remarkably sketchy.

We do know that the number of museums boomed in the late twentieth century. In 1960, the Standing Commission for Museums and Galleries took a census and listed some 896 museums. When the same commission took a census a decade later they reported that there were over 1,000 museums and, sounding somewhat anxious, they commented that there were no controls on their formation. No such restrictions were introduced and the number of museums continued to rise. The 1978 Standing Commission described the ‘sheer proliferation’ and ‘bewildering fecundity’ of the sector and, in the mid-1980s commentators started declaring that museums were opening at the rate of one a fortnight, and then one a week, or even three a week. By 1986 government reports placed the number of museums between 2000 and 2,300, although one survey thought it might be as high as 3,500. The official total subsequently inched to around 2,500 and, according to the Museums Association, that figure has remained more or less stable. At the very least, the number of museums has increased by around 180%.

We also know that the vast majority of those museums were independent, in that they did not receive direct funding from the state. In 1960 when the Standing Commission conducted its survey, around 300 museums were independently managed, about one third of the total, whereas in 1986 that statistic was more or less reversed, with around 1800 of a total 2,300 museums being independent, the remainder being national, local authority, university or regimental museums. This made them the single biggest type of museum within the sector.

The boom in the number of museums was and is recognized as a cultural phenomenon, but beyond the rising numbers and the fact that the majority of the museums were independent organisations, we have very little information about it. We don’t know exactly where the new museums opened within the UK, or when, or what subject matter they covered. Nor do we know if these new museums survived, or when they closed, or how many new museums opened: There may be around 2,500 museums but it is entirely possible that hundreds have closed and hundreds have opened in the past few decades.

Now I confess, that when I first realized that there was relatively little information on the development of the museum sector, I judged it to be little more than an inconvenience. At the time I was working on my book Micromuseology: an analysis of small independent museums and I was wholly uninterested in the specifics of whether there were more museums in the English Midlands than in the Scottish Highlands, or how many museums were devoted to hats as opposed to trains. That seemed like bean counting, a quantitative exercise that would reveal nothing of substantial interest about the sector. It took some time before I realized quite how wrong I was. Having this information would enable me to write new and very different histories of museums in the UK, and to begin to understand how the sector had changed. More than that, it would allow me rethink dominant preconceptions about the location and production of culture in Britain. Once I realised what the information would enable I started to wonder if it could be compiled, and is so, how. Over the following year I began to plan the Mapping Museum project, which eventually gained funding in June 2016 and was launched in the October of that year.

Over the next few blog posts I’ll explain a little about why the data was missing and how the Mapping team has begun to compile a dataset of all museums that opened (and closed) in the UK between 1960 and 2020.

 

©Fiona Candlin May 2017