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January 2009
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The fellowships are intended to encourage knowledge sharing and succession planning to be embedded into museum working practices. If you have recently retired or are about to retire from a UK museum and would like the chance to share your collections-related expertise with your successor and the wider museum community, we want to hear from you. Fellowships will not support research but aim to record and share existing collections-related knowledge that might otherwise be lost. Fellowships will be either 50 or 100 days in length, typically spread over 6 or 12 months. All applications will require the support of a host museum, which should be the Fellow's former place of work. We particularly welcome applications that also have the support of an organisation from the wider museum community, such as a regional museum hub or subject specialist network.
The first round of Fellowships was announced in October 2007. A number of Fellows at UK museums are currently working on sharing their knowledge.
A key theme of Collections for the Future, the MA's 2005 report, is that collections-related knowledge is as important an asset for museums as the collections themselves. Some of this knowledge can be brought in from outside but museums themselves will always need staff with knowledge of the collection. Collections for the Future found that in many cases museums do employ experienced curators and other professionals who have extensive knowledge of the collections. However they have many demands on their time and do not spend enough of their time making use of their specialist knowledge by, for example, contributing to new displays, on-line learning resources and exhibitions, or even adding to the museum's collections records. This problem is exacerbated by serious difficulties with succession planning. Often, when an experienced curator or other specialist professional leaves a museum, much of their knowledge of the collection - accumulated over several decades - leaves with them. In spite of their best endeavours to record their knowledge, the day-to-day pressures of the job inevitably mean much never gets written down or shared with others. This scheme aims to begin to address this problem. The MA has received funding of £150,000 from the Monument Trust for the scheme, which aims specifically at capturing collections knowledge held by experienced individuals who are retiring from museums. The funding is being used to develop a pilot programme of post-retirement Fellowships. Our ambition is that succession projects such as the fellowships will become integrated as a normal part of the museum sector's approach to staffing and development, with succession planning being embedded into museums' working practices. The Fellowships will be awarded to retiring collections specialists, with the specific purpose of passing on the knowledge they have accumulated of museum collections. The Fellowships will not be for research but to record and share the Fellow's existing knowledge for the benefit of the museum they have left, the wider museum sector - and ultimately the public at large.
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