Tag: surveys

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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

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Research Process

Galleries without collection: in or out of the surveys?

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 collection which are open to the public, regardless of their importance’. As they went on to observe, their definition excluded ‘exhibition galleries which have no permanent collection, like the Whitechapel Art Gallery or the Arts Council Gallery at Cambridge’. This particular boundary line has remained more or less consistent throughout the last sixty years of data collection. The Whitechapel Gallery did not feature in the major DOMUS survey of the 1990s and does not appear on the Arts Council list. Likewise, the Baltic gallery in Newcastle which has no permanent collection is similarly absent, as are numerous small organisations that hold changing exhibitions.

At stake here is the importance of collections in the characterisation of museums within the UK. Their centrality is most evident in definitions of museums. When the Museums Association first formulated a definition in 1971, they stated that they were institutions ‘where objects relating to the arts, sciences or human history are collected, adequately recorded, displayed, stored and conserved’, and they kept the emphasis on collections in the 1984 definition, which read that ‘a museum is an institution which collects, documents, preserves, exhibits and interprets material evidence and associated information for the public benefit’. This was superseded in 1998 by the current dictum, which states that ‘a museum collects, safeguards, researches, develops, makes accessible and interprets collections and associated information’. Yet despite the changes in terms, all three definitions maintain that a museum had to actively collect and to care for objects, and thereby establish the centrality of collections to the constitution and identity of a museum. Most surveys conducted in the UK from the 1970s onwards have observed the relevant definition, and so galleries without collections have been routinely omitted from data collection.

This exclusion raises a question for our research, which is: should we include or exclude galleries without collections from our research? In the 1960s and 70s collections were the defining feature of a museum, and so the exclusion of galleries without permanent collections did make sense. Since then, that orientation has come into question. In his notable article ‘From Being about Something to be Being for Somebody’, the American curator and commentator Stephen Weil observed that a combination of economic imperatives and a growing sense of professionalism has prompted museums to become outward facing and to actively foster their audiences. This changed orientation has led to more exhibitions that are organised around a topic or theme, rather than around the institutions’ holdings, and to the greater use of explanatory texts, photography, audio-visual material, and interactive opportunities. Noting these curatorial trends, Stephen Conn asked ‘do museums need objects?’ and it has become increasingly clear that some venues did not, or else they only needed a few. Many museums present immersive and theatrical experiences, or use architecture to create an emotional response in the viewer, and while they may also exhibit artefacts, they are not necessarily centre-stage.

The primacy of collections has also been questioned in relation to intangible heritage. In the 1970s and 80s heritage practitioners became increasingly aware that song, dance, food, theatre, and ritual practices were important cultural manifestations that may also require a degree of protection. In Japan people with a high degree of expertise in specific crafts and practices had been designated Living National Treasures and provided with degree of financial and practical support. Western commentators began to recommend a similar approach was taken to other cultures and the issues were extensively debated at a series of UNESCO general conferences. In 2003 the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage was published, which emphasised that cultural heritage does not end at monuments and collections of objects. Rather includes ‘traditions or living expressions inherited from our ancestors and passed on to our descendants, such as oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe or the knowledge and skills to produce traditional crafts’. It is within this context that heritage and to some degree museums became much less object-focused.

In many respects, venues such as the Whitechapel Gallery and the Baltic more closely resemble traditional museums than the newer venues that prioritise experience or those that focus on cultural practices more generally. Even if galleries do not own a collection, or hold it in public trust, they do focus upon, show and interpret objects. Given these shifts in museum practice, excluding galleries without holdings may be anomalous.

On the other hand, galleries without collections do function differently in that they do not care for objects in the long-term. The staff do not focus on keeping things for posterity but on short-term exhibitions, and this gives those venues a very different orientation. The institutions are different in kind. Moreover, including galleries without collections has the practical implication of massively increasing the number of venues that need to be listed. There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of art centres and exhibition spaces that would qualify for inclusion and the scope of the project would massively increase.

What do you think? Should art galleries without collection be in or out of the Mapping Museums dataset?

 

Copyright of Fiona Candlin January 2018

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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

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Research Process

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.

The definitions developed or adopted by the UK Museums Association and agreed at the Annual General Meeting of that date are as follows:

We define a museum as an institution where objects relating to the arts, sciences or human history are collected, adequately recorded, displayed, stored and conserved, and are made available for the research and for the instruction and interest of the public or, in the case of some specialised museums, of a restricted public. (1971)

A museum is a non-profit making, permanent institution in the service of the society and its development, and open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates, and exhibits, for purposes of study, education and enjoyment, material evidence of man and his environment. (1977, ICOM definition)

A museum is an institution which collects, documents, preserves, exhibits and interprets material evidence and associated information for the public benefit. (1984)

Museums are for people to explore and learn from collections for understanding and inspiration. To do this, a museum collects, safeguards, researches, develops, makes accessible and interprets collections and associated information, which it holds in trust for society. (1998)

At present, two definitions are in common use. The 1998 definition is used in England, Northern Ireland and Wales, and in the accreditation scheme, whereas Scotland generally adheres to the current ICOM definition, which is:

A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment (2007).

The introduction of definitions helped shaped the remit of museum surveys, and hence past and current conceptions of the museum sector. In the next few posts I’ll be discussing what kinds of venues were routinely included and excluded from official reviews and surveys. Here, however, I want to make a few brief observations about the definitions noted above and how they relate to the Mapping Museums project.

All the definitions state that museums are ‘institutions’, which suggests that the organisation has established procedures and practices, and that it is or will be of long-standing. It can also imply that the museum is contained in a building. The ICOM definition refers to a ‘permanent institution’, which further underlines notions of longevity. However, equating museums with permanent institutions is problematic for organisations that do not have a long term lease on their property, that are housed in fragile premises, or are run as pop-ups. Hence the definitions tend to exclude venues that are new, are not financially secure, or have a more experimental form.

With the exception of the most recent ICOM formulation, the definitions also place a high degree of emphasis on objects. The 1971 rubric specifies that museums keep objects relating to the arts, sciences, or human history, terms that are replaced by ‘material evidence of man and his environment’. This patriarchal formulation reduces humans to ‘man’ (in the singular) and claims a possessive relation to the natural world (‘his environment), as if the world was primarily a context for man’s existence. This definition, in turn, was superseded by the phrase ‘material evidence and associated information’, which recognises that museums may also collect various kinds of archival and documentary material, not just the objects that go on exhibition. In its most recent iteration, the UK Museums Association refers to ‘collections’, a more general and hence inclusive designation, but one that has prompted us to ask: what constitutes a collection? How many objects are required for a collection? Can a building or an archaeological site comprise a collection?

Other points are worth making. The 1971 definition does not require museums to be accessible to everyone, whereas later definitions put a high emphasis on public access and benefit. In 1977 ICOM requires museums to communicate and in 1984 the Museums Association has decided they must also interpret, terms that simultaneously reflect and promote the move from museums being relatively inward facing and functioning as storehouses and centres of research to museums being outward facing and actively engaging audiences. It is also notable that until 1998, the Museums Association definitions make no reference to governance. The issue of whether a museum is run as a business, has no formal structure, is in private hands, is a not-for-profit, or established as a trust, is irrelevant to whether it is considered to be a museum. This particular aspect of the newer definition has real consequences for small independent museums that have been set up on an ad hoc basis, or provide employment for its founders or owners as it means that they officially cease to qualify as museums.

Above all, it is important to note that definitions change. I stress this point because, in the course of collecting data for the Mapping Museums research, various professionals have queried and, on occasion strongly objected to us collecting information on museums that fall outside of the current definition. Yet no definition is set in stone. They do not encompass some universal truth or essential quality. Rather, each definition have been introduced and written in particular historical, cultural, political, and economic circumstances. For example, the Museums Association definition of 1998 was devised in response to the policy directives of the New Labour government and to demonstrate that museums could have a role in the wider public sphere. No doubt the definition will change again, and indeed representatives of ICOM will discuss that possibility at the Defining Museums conference in St Andrews in November this year.

A related point is that multiple conceptions of museums are in circulation at any one time. For this reason I applaud the 1971 rubric because it begins with the phrase ‘We define…’, the implication being that this is our definition but there are others. That open-handedness is lost in subsequent definitions, which present the characteristics of museums as being matters of fact rather than as one possible conception among many. It is time to revise that position.

© Fiona Candlin October 2017.

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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

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Research Process

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 cross-UK surveys, three that concentrated on Wales, two on Ireland, and one apiece on museums in Scotland and England. Dozens of smaller surveys concentrated on specific regions or aspects of the sector, Arts Council England keeps lists of museums across the UK, and the Museums Association runs a Find-A-Museum service. Why then, is it so hard to get information about the rising numbers of museums? In this blog I identify five reasons why this massive amount of data has not translated into information.

 

  1. Lost data

The first major survey that falls within our time period is the Standing Commission Report on Provincial Museums of 1963. Very conveniently, it is available in print form from major public libraries, and contains both the final report of the committee and a complete list of museums sorted according to region. From there onwards, however, the raw data largely disappears from government publications on the subject. The 1973 Standing Commission report, for instance, enumerates the different types of museums and provides an overview of emerging trends, but it does not provide a list of museums or the information that relates to individual venues, which we need if we are to track the emergence and development of the sector. As far as we know, the original data that was collected for that survey and for subsequent surveys conducted by the Standing Commission has been lost.

Research on museums conducted by other organisations is similarly missing. In 1983, the Association of Independent Museums (AIM) undertook a large-scale survey of that sector, but they do not seem to have published a report, and initially we were only aware of the survey’s existence from a handful of references in other contemporaneous sources. After some time, however, we found photocopies of the typewritten lists and the original survey questionnaires lodged in a university archive. We have been less successful in finding the information associated with the ‘UK Data base project’ of 1987. The Museums Association, which ran the survey, has a small in-house archive and its historic materials are kept at University College London. Unfortunately, neither archive contains any of the relevant materials. No-body in either organisation has any recollection of the survey taking place or any idea of where the material went, although it is likely that the UK Data base materials were thrown out when the Museums Association moved offices earlier this century.

  1. Indecipherable data

A second problem for researchers interested in the museums of the late twentieth century is whether the data is usable or not. One of the most important surveys of UK museums was the

Digest of Museum Statistics, otherwise known as DOMUS. From 1994 to 1998, it collected information on all accredited museums, some 1700, and generated a huge amount of material. When the project was closed, most of the paperwork was deposited in the National Archives and so researchers can easily find and download documents pertaining to the surveys. The problem is, the material is difficult to decipher. As well as some documentary material, the archive consists of three folders, each containing around fifty files that contain the raw data from DOMUS. All of the folders and files have coded names. The files comprise of spreadsheets with numerous columns that have similarly opaque headings. Some sheets are virtually empty, while others contain over two thousand entries. There is no explanation as to how these tables relate to each other, what the files or columns refer to, or how the user is supposed to decipher them. Using this data requires someone to unlock the coding system and re-constitute the original database.

  1. Data that is not easily accessible

The Museums Association currently compiles the most extensive dataset relating to UK museums. Their Find-A-Museum service lists information on the whereabouts, visitor numbers, staff, subject matter and governance of around two thousand museums. However, the Museums Association is a commercial enterprise and accessing this data incurs a fee. Users must pay to join the association and cover the subscription charges for the Find A Museum Service, at a minimum cost of around £186 for an individual or £450 for an organisation. In addition, the data cannot be downloaded or manipulated, and can only be examined via the service’s own rather limited search engine. Find-A-Museum is intended for museum professionals who want to look up information on specific venues, and is not designed with researchers in mind, but it does mean that one of the most substantial data sources on museums to be available in the UK cannot be used for broader analysis.

Other lists and surveys of museums are compiled by the various government bodies that oversee museums, namely, the Arts Council England (ACE), the Northern Ireland Museums Council (NIMC), Museums Galleries Scotland (MGS), and the Welsh Museums, Archives, Libraries Division (MALD). These organisations do not publish their data although they do make it available on request and without charge. In our experience, the four government bodies have been very helpful in the provision of data but we are aware that they do not have staff whose role it is to deal with such requests and there is no automatic or established mechanism by which data can be obtained.

 

  1. Incompatible data formats

Having acquired data from the various surveys and lists conducted by ACE, NIMC, MGS, and MALD, researchers will find that each of the government bodies collects different data, with significant variations in the level of detail, and about slightly different kinds of organisations over a range of dates. The spreadsheets cannot be simply merged. Moreover, if researchers want to include historic data, as we do, this all has to be transcribed by hand.

 

  1. Partial and missing data

On collating the available information, researchers might spot a further problem, which is that surveys and lists compiled by government bodies invariably concentrate on accredited museums. The accreditation scheme, which is co-ordinated by Arts Council England, establishes that a museum has achieved professional standards, but small independent museums often lack the staff or the know-how to apply for accreditation, or may not meet the criteria set by the scheme. Museums Galleries Scotland and the Museums Archives Libraries Division in Wales invite non-accredited museums to make themselves known and they do list such venues in their reports and on websites, although submitting data still requires a certain degree of professional capacity or interest. Thus as far as the official reports are concerned, small independent museums are routinely omitted. Indeed, the only survey to have actively sought information on such venues was the one conducted by AIM in 1982/3, and never published.

There are also other omissions. Properties owned by the National Trust register in some surveys and not in others, while few surveys include art galleries that do not have permanent collections, so established venues such as the Baltic in Newcastle or the Whitechapel in London rarely appear in the data.

Finally, information that is essential to a historically minded researcher is less relevant to museum professionals who focus on the current environment. Only one of the surveys registered the foundation dates of museums, and none have listed closure. Once the doors of a museum have been shut to the public, that venue ceases to appear in surveys.

 

In summary, then: Over the last five decades several associations and government departments have collected an enormous amount of information about UK museums. There is no lack of data. There are problems with archiving, making that information comprehensible and accessible, with sharing data across national and organisational borders, with collecting historical data and information on venues that do not reach professional standards or that do not quite fit an orthodox model of museums, and on compiling data. These factors help explain why researchers cannot elucidate recent developments within the museum sector and specifically the emergence of independent museums. There is a wider question, however, about why arts organisations seem to have been so poor at keeping, managing and sharing data. Thoughts on that matter would be welcome, as indeed would any clues as to the whereabouts of the data collected for the 1987 UK Museums database project and for Standing Commission surveys other than the 1963 publication.

©Fiona Candlin May 2017