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August 2008
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The review element is proving to be a popular concept for museums. Some reasons given for review are that museums want to get a better understanding of what they have, to tackle issues around ownership and provenance, to assess condition and improve collections care, or to consider retention and rationalisation. Stored collection reviews provided through Effective Collections can only meet some of these demands and cannot offer catch-all solutions that remove the burden of research or decision-making from museums. Effective Collections stored collection reviews will work on two basic models where reviewers spend anything from a day to a fortnight at a museum, dependent on need. In the first model, a subject-specialist will visit a museum to assess a discrete part of the collection where those specialist skills are not available from the in-house curators; for example a small group of Egyptian objects held within a social history museum's collection. In this case the reviewer will audit all of the objects within their specialist area of the collection to assess their relevance and relative importance. The reviewer will then provide a report to the museum recommending what to do with the objects: stating the prime candidates for loan, perhaps ideas for redisplay of objects to make the most of them at the home museum, and maybe objects to consider for permanent transfer to another museum or for an alternative form of disposal. In accepting a stored collection review a museum will be expected to commit to pursuing at least some part of the report's recommendations and take responsibility for any necessary research into provenance or legal issues surrounding individual objects. The piloting stage of Effective Collections will be particularly valuable to find ways to support museums in getting from a review of a collection to actual loans, transfers or redisplay. In the second model, rather than providing knowledge about a specialist area of a collection, a reviewer will be provided to advise staff on the process of reviewing their collection as a whole. In these cases the reviewer will spend their time at the museum being shadowed by curators; for example reviewing a portion of the stored collection ready for curators to continue the process independently. Again, the reviewer will provide a report making recommendations about future uses of objects and the museum will pursue these options with support from the Effective Collections programme to broker loans or consider disposal. Reviewing collections is an expensive process. To get the most from this work case studies of reviews undertaken will be added to this website, alongside other information about collection reviews. For an overview of Effective Collections, please click here For other information about the MA's collections work, click here ^ TOP
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