Museums are continuing to tackle issues around storage, highlighted in November’s Mendoza Review, with the recent announcement of a number of new facilities for national museums in England.
In January, the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) unveiled plans for a £25m collections and research centre in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in east London.
In November, the Science Museum Group launched a public consultation regarding a new collection management site in Wroughton, Wiltshire.
The British Museum, meanwhile, intends to develop a storage and research facility outside Reading to hold part of its research collection.
The initiatives follow the government announcing its decision to sell Blythe House, London, which is used by all three museums, in the 2015 Autumn Statement.
The Mendoza Review highlights several challenges with museum storage: “Storage has been a low priority for funders, which tend to concentrate on areas open to visitors. However, basic building infrastructure or storage projects that protect the collection can be just as important to the visitor experience. Storage has suffered underinvestment and lack of maintenance, leaving inadequate facilities with little public access, insufficient space or poor environmental quality. This has placed valuable collections at risk or, in a few cases, already resulted in damage.”
Tim Reeve, the V&A’s deputy director and chief operating officer, says: “Storage is always a difficult conundrum for museums. Instinctively, museums acquire with the intention of making items accessible but, for whatever reason, over the decades that has not always been straightforward.
“But I think there has been a movement, not just in the UK but across most of Europe, to start to take this seriously. You do see the description of accessible storage used quite freely, and people mean different things by it. But it seems the general intent is to make a real step change to make reserve or non-display collections archives more accessible to a more general audience, rather than just researchers and scholars. There is a real impetus from museums to make it a reality.”
Reeve says that collections need to be accessible to more people and, in recent years, the government has been supportive of museums’ efforts to make this happen.
Gail Boyle, the chair of the Society for Museum Archaeology, says archaeological museums are challenged by a disconnect between the National Planning Policy Framework and statutory provision for space to store archaeological archives from development. This is leading to a significant amount of material not being publicly accessible, with many local museums citing lack of space as a problem.
“There have already been a number of sector-wide initiatives to identify the level of the problem and to sort out what the sustainable solution might be,” says Boyle.
“This is not something we are ignorant of – this is something we have been proactively trying to deal with. It is possible that we’ll need regional or national solutions to solve the problem. And that will require funding.
“We’re always at pains to express this is a museum-wide issue, not just an archaeology problem. We’ve been able to raise the issue of archaeological archives because we have been taking action to assess the problem really well.”
The Museums Association is holding a conference on storage on 3 December at the British Museum, London
In January, the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) unveiled plans for a £25m collections and research centre in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in east London.
In November, the Science Museum Group launched a public consultation regarding a new collection management site in Wroughton, Wiltshire.
The British Museum, meanwhile, intends to develop a storage and research facility outside Reading to hold part of its research collection.
The initiatives follow the government announcing its decision to sell Blythe House, London, which is used by all three museums, in the 2015 Autumn Statement.
The Mendoza Review highlights several challenges with museum storage: “Storage has been a low priority for funders, which tend to concentrate on areas open to visitors. However, basic building infrastructure or storage projects that protect the collection can be just as important to the visitor experience. Storage has suffered underinvestment and lack of maintenance, leaving inadequate facilities with little public access, insufficient space or poor environmental quality. This has placed valuable collections at risk or, in a few cases, already resulted in damage.”
Tim Reeve, the V&A’s deputy director and chief operating officer, says: “Storage is always a difficult conundrum for museums. Instinctively, museums acquire with the intention of making items accessible but, for whatever reason, over the decades that has not always been straightforward.
“But I think there has been a movement, not just in the UK but across most of Europe, to start to take this seriously. You do see the description of accessible storage used quite freely, and people mean different things by it. But it seems the general intent is to make a real step change to make reserve or non-display collections archives more accessible to a more general audience, rather than just researchers and scholars. There is a real impetus from museums to make it a reality.”
Reeve says that collections need to be accessible to more people and, in recent years, the government has been supportive of museums’ efforts to make this happen.
Gail Boyle, the chair of the Society for Museum Archaeology, says archaeological museums are challenged by a disconnect between the National Planning Policy Framework and statutory provision for space to store archaeological archives from development. This is leading to a significant amount of material not being publicly accessible, with many local museums citing lack of space as a problem.
“There have already been a number of sector-wide initiatives to identify the level of the problem and to sort out what the sustainable solution might be,” says Boyle.
“This is not something we are ignorant of – this is something we have been proactively trying to deal with. It is possible that we’ll need regional or national solutions to solve the problem. And that will require funding.
“We’re always at pains to express this is a museum-wide issue, not just an archaeology problem. We’ve been able to raise the issue of archaeological archives because we have been taking action to assess the problem really well.”
The Museums Association is holding a conference on storage on 3 December at the British Museum, London