Museums are routinely regarded as the most expendable of local authority services, which is a dangerous position to be in at a time when local and central government are looking for cuts and budgets are shrinking. In a choice between keeping a museum open five days a week or closing down an after-school club, the museum tends to lose out.
Apart from anything else, tearful children and angry parents make worse local newspaper headlines than glum curators.It is symptomatic of the prevailing problem for cultural services, locally and nationally, in an era when everything in the public sector is required to be weighed and measured. People who work in museums and galleries know they make a valuable contribution to society - but how do they prove it?
In Bolton, the Metropolitan Borough Council and Museum, Libraries and Archives North West (MLA North West) have attempted to address the problem by elevating the status of their cultural services in the eyes of key decision-makers in a study of the city's museums, libraries and archives. Carried out by Jura Consultants, it examines the economic value of museums, libraries and archives through a methodology known as contingent valuation.
Basically, it measures the economic impact of a service through individuals' willingness to pay for it whether or not they are regular users. It also asks people how much they would be willing to accept in order to forgo the service. The same approach was used by the British Library in 2003 to assess its value to the UK economy. Bolton residents were surveyed using face-to-face questionnaires and focus groups. In total, 325 people took part and the study cost £40,000.
For all three services, people were willing to pay more than the current cost per month. To keep their museums running, council-tax payers actually pay £1.16 per month but, according to the research, they would be willing to pay £2.77 a month - an extra £1.61. Museums emerged as being of high importance to residents. Libraries were most highly valued while archives did less well, although this might be partly because of their physical detachment from other services.
Stephanie Crossley, Bolton's assistant director for adult services, is responsible for culture. She believes the report will bolster her department's case in the December spending round.
'I think it means we will no longer be regarded as a soft touch and we're less likely to suffer a disproportionate cut, by comparison with other services, than would have been the case in the past. We know it's very difficult to defend cultural services against cuts that affect individuals. But [the report] has enabled us to show that there is more than one way to contribute to people's lives.'
Economics aside, Alan Boughey, the libraries development officer at MLA North West, was impressed by how other aspects of the contingent value methodology captured the value of the sector to individuals.
'Respondents gave values expressing their own personal use - how often, how much benefit they got socially, culturally, educationally - as well as the value to their family, particularly the value to the children of respondents, and to the sense of community as a whole. It is expressed clearly in the value ascribed by non-users, a figure that was especially high for museums.'
The national Museums, Libraries and Archives Council intends to include the Bolton report alongside other research in its evidence to government for the forthcoming comprehensive spending round.
Sue Howley, the head of research, says: 'For me, the Bolton work is valuable because it shows value that non-users place on museums. In this sector, you are always up against the fact that the majority of the population do not use museums, but the Bolton work shows that [non-users] still value them and they want to live in a society in which museums, libraries and archives exist and flourish. That to me is getting at the heart of public value.'
Crossley and Boughey believe the research methodology could be applied elsewhere (and the final report includes a toolkit for the purpose), but there are caveats. Other local authorities point out that Bolton is unusual in having no tourist industry, which other towns and cities would need to take into account in any assessment of services.
At £40,000, the cost would also be prohibitive for many, and data collection is already an expensive task - the Museum of London spends £25,000 a year on crunching numbers to meet its performance indicator requirements alone.
However, the Bolton work has sparked interest around the sector. It is in line with thinking elsewhere about 'public value' and the belief that there must be better and more meaningful ways to measure performance in the cultural sector than are currently in use.
John Holden, the head of culture for the thinktank Demos, believes it is time for museums and the rest of the cultural sector to be more self-confident about their own fundamental worth. Culture, he argues, is as essential to public wellbeing as the twin stalwarts of education and health, and museums should be saying so.
In his 2006 report Cultural Value and the Crisis of Legitimacy, he identifies three types of value generated by publicly-funded culture: intrinsic, which relates to intellectual, emotional and spiritual impact; instrumental - social or economic value; and institutional - the contribution an institution makes to the public good.
Holden says the trouble is that politicians and policymakers have traditionally set great store by instrumental outcomes, whereas the public and professionals have different priorities.
For professionals in local authorities in particular, it leads to frustration, he says. 'It means that they don't talk about what they do in terms of what they do, but in terms of other agendas - regeneration, health, buildings. Cultural value is not accepted as valuable in its own right.'
There won't be too many in museums that will dissent, but arguing that museums are intrinsically worthwhile has not won them any favours from funders recently. To ally public value to public expenditure in the eyes of funders, Holden says cultural organisations need to try to find new ways of engaging with the public to find out what the public wants and feels. This could mean involving them more closely in governance, for example.
But is this new? There are plenty working in museums that are engaging with the public and striving to increase the depth, breadth and reach of access to collections and knowledge. Digitisation in particular has changed the way museums relate to the public, changing the role of museums from editors, creators and controllers of information to enablers and aggregators and allowing people to use collections in the way they want.
Holden acknowledges the good work that exists but argues that it is not universal and the public's role is not yet sufficiently embedded. 'It needs a shift in thinking towards the public as a central element in all this and a deep engagement between institutions and the public,' he says.
David Fleming, the director of National Museums Liverpool, likes the idea. 'In the US, the so-called social enterprise model of the museum fits with this notion, that a museum, in order to be supported through public moneys, should be judged by the people who provide it. Basically, I can see no flaw in the argument that public opinion should form part of the assessment process by which we judge publicly-funded institutions, like museums. It certainly should be beneficial for the public, in that it would lead to better museums.'
But not everyone agrees. Sara Selwood, the professor of cultural policy and management at City University in London, says it is still unclear how public value would relate to accountability. 'Public value itself doesn't represent a measure of anything. I'm not sure it takes us further than any quantitive measures, except that some people in the sector feel more comfortable with it.'
Stuart Davies, a consultant and a former Heritage Lottery Fund policy adviser, also has reservations. 'With public value I think we are in danger of falling into the trap that measuring the impact of museums often falls into, which is the search for the one answer. There isn't one measure.'
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is currently exploring the idea of public value and is expected to signal in its forthcoming research strategy that in the future it will be looking for evidence of the impact of museums' activities on the quality of life of communities, rather than increased participation alone.
The department is also part of a consortium (which includes the Home Office, Ofcom, the Royal Opera House and local authorities) that is working with the Work Foundation on a report to establish a concrete definition of public value and how it might be measured.
'What we are trying to think about with public value is how our organisations can work with the public to be responsive to them outside of a classic market or quasi-market model,' says a DCMS spokesman.
Co-production - professionals and public working together - is emerging as a key way in which institutions can be responsive and work in a way that makes them valued by the public, he says. 'It's about how to take the expertise of curators, for example, and blend that with the public so that it produces something of value and the public understand what you are doing. But we are not there yet in terms of a fully rounded theory.'
Some may argue that the government's enthusiasm for the public value concept is a sign that it is latching on to yet another trend, in the same way that regeneration and social inclusion (of which we hear less these days) were once in vogue. There is probably something in that; some people have detected an 'ideas vacuum' at the DCMS of late.
But there are two other points worth considering. The first is that the work on public value is not confined to the department for culture, but is influencing policy across government departments. In particular, it is shaping the thinking on how to make services more responsive as part of the public service reform agenda.
The second is the BBC: its successful case for charter renewal was built around its policy document Building Public Value, which positioned public interest - rather than profit or technological innovation - as the driving force at the heart of the corporation's future.
Clearly, public value is winning some serious arguments - ones that museums need to win too.
Julie Nightingale is a freelance journalist
Bolton research: www.mlanorthwest.org.uk/mlanorthwest/publications/
John Holden's report: www.demos.co.uk/publications/culturallegitimacy
Apart from anything else, tearful children and angry parents make worse local newspaper headlines than glum curators.It is symptomatic of the prevailing problem for cultural services, locally and nationally, in an era when everything in the public sector is required to be weighed and measured. People who work in museums and galleries know they make a valuable contribution to society - but how do they prove it?
In Bolton, the Metropolitan Borough Council and Museum, Libraries and Archives North West (MLA North West) have attempted to address the problem by elevating the status of their cultural services in the eyes of key decision-makers in a study of the city's museums, libraries and archives. Carried out by Jura Consultants, it examines the economic value of museums, libraries and archives through a methodology known as contingent valuation.
Basically, it measures the economic impact of a service through individuals' willingness to pay for it whether or not they are regular users. It also asks people how much they would be willing to accept in order to forgo the service. The same approach was used by the British Library in 2003 to assess its value to the UK economy. Bolton residents were surveyed using face-to-face questionnaires and focus groups. In total, 325 people took part and the study cost £40,000.
For all three services, people were willing to pay more than the current cost per month. To keep their museums running, council-tax payers actually pay £1.16 per month but, according to the research, they would be willing to pay £2.77 a month - an extra £1.61. Museums emerged as being of high importance to residents. Libraries were most highly valued while archives did less well, although this might be partly because of their physical detachment from other services.
Stephanie Crossley, Bolton's assistant director for adult services, is responsible for culture. She believes the report will bolster her department's case in the December spending round.
'I think it means we will no longer be regarded as a soft touch and we're less likely to suffer a disproportionate cut, by comparison with other services, than would have been the case in the past. We know it's very difficult to defend cultural services against cuts that affect individuals. But [the report] has enabled us to show that there is more than one way to contribute to people's lives.'
Economics aside, Alan Boughey, the libraries development officer at MLA North West, was impressed by how other aspects of the contingent value methodology captured the value of the sector to individuals.
'Respondents gave values expressing their own personal use - how often, how much benefit they got socially, culturally, educationally - as well as the value to their family, particularly the value to the children of respondents, and to the sense of community as a whole. It is expressed clearly in the value ascribed by non-users, a figure that was especially high for museums.'
The national Museums, Libraries and Archives Council intends to include the Bolton report alongside other research in its evidence to government for the forthcoming comprehensive spending round.
Sue Howley, the head of research, says: 'For me, the Bolton work is valuable because it shows value that non-users place on museums. In this sector, you are always up against the fact that the majority of the population do not use museums, but the Bolton work shows that [non-users] still value them and they want to live in a society in which museums, libraries and archives exist and flourish. That to me is getting at the heart of public value.'
Crossley and Boughey believe the research methodology could be applied elsewhere (and the final report includes a toolkit for the purpose), but there are caveats. Other local authorities point out that Bolton is unusual in having no tourist industry, which other towns and cities would need to take into account in any assessment of services.
At £40,000, the cost would also be prohibitive for many, and data collection is already an expensive task - the Museum of London spends £25,000 a year on crunching numbers to meet its performance indicator requirements alone.
However, the Bolton work has sparked interest around the sector. It is in line with thinking elsewhere about 'public value' and the belief that there must be better and more meaningful ways to measure performance in the cultural sector than are currently in use.
John Holden, the head of culture for the thinktank Demos, believes it is time for museums and the rest of the cultural sector to be more self-confident about their own fundamental worth. Culture, he argues, is as essential to public wellbeing as the twin stalwarts of education and health, and museums should be saying so.
In his 2006 report Cultural Value and the Crisis of Legitimacy, he identifies three types of value generated by publicly-funded culture: intrinsic, which relates to intellectual, emotional and spiritual impact; instrumental - social or economic value; and institutional - the contribution an institution makes to the public good.
Holden says the trouble is that politicians and policymakers have traditionally set great store by instrumental outcomes, whereas the public and professionals have different priorities.
For professionals in local authorities in particular, it leads to frustration, he says. 'It means that they don't talk about what they do in terms of what they do, but in terms of other agendas - regeneration, health, buildings. Cultural value is not accepted as valuable in its own right.'
There won't be too many in museums that will dissent, but arguing that museums are intrinsically worthwhile has not won them any favours from funders recently. To ally public value to public expenditure in the eyes of funders, Holden says cultural organisations need to try to find new ways of engaging with the public to find out what the public wants and feels. This could mean involving them more closely in governance, for example.
But is this new? There are plenty working in museums that are engaging with the public and striving to increase the depth, breadth and reach of access to collections and knowledge. Digitisation in particular has changed the way museums relate to the public, changing the role of museums from editors, creators and controllers of information to enablers and aggregators and allowing people to use collections in the way they want.
Holden acknowledges the good work that exists but argues that it is not universal and the public's role is not yet sufficiently embedded. 'It needs a shift in thinking towards the public as a central element in all this and a deep engagement between institutions and the public,' he says.
David Fleming, the director of National Museums Liverpool, likes the idea. 'In the US, the so-called social enterprise model of the museum fits with this notion, that a museum, in order to be supported through public moneys, should be judged by the people who provide it. Basically, I can see no flaw in the argument that public opinion should form part of the assessment process by which we judge publicly-funded institutions, like museums. It certainly should be beneficial for the public, in that it would lead to better museums.'
But not everyone agrees. Sara Selwood, the professor of cultural policy and management at City University in London, says it is still unclear how public value would relate to accountability. 'Public value itself doesn't represent a measure of anything. I'm not sure it takes us further than any quantitive measures, except that some people in the sector feel more comfortable with it.'
Stuart Davies, a consultant and a former Heritage Lottery Fund policy adviser, also has reservations. 'With public value I think we are in danger of falling into the trap that measuring the impact of museums often falls into, which is the search for the one answer. There isn't one measure.'
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is currently exploring the idea of public value and is expected to signal in its forthcoming research strategy that in the future it will be looking for evidence of the impact of museums' activities on the quality of life of communities, rather than increased participation alone.
The department is also part of a consortium (which includes the Home Office, Ofcom, the Royal Opera House and local authorities) that is working with the Work Foundation on a report to establish a concrete definition of public value and how it might be measured.
'What we are trying to think about with public value is how our organisations can work with the public to be responsive to them outside of a classic market or quasi-market model,' says a DCMS spokesman.
Co-production - professionals and public working together - is emerging as a key way in which institutions can be responsive and work in a way that makes them valued by the public, he says. 'It's about how to take the expertise of curators, for example, and blend that with the public so that it produces something of value and the public understand what you are doing. But we are not there yet in terms of a fully rounded theory.'
Some may argue that the government's enthusiasm for the public value concept is a sign that it is latching on to yet another trend, in the same way that regeneration and social inclusion (of which we hear less these days) were once in vogue. There is probably something in that; some people have detected an 'ideas vacuum' at the DCMS of late.
But there are two other points worth considering. The first is that the work on public value is not confined to the department for culture, but is influencing policy across government departments. In particular, it is shaping the thinking on how to make services more responsive as part of the public service reform agenda.
The second is the BBC: its successful case for charter renewal was built around its policy document Building Public Value, which positioned public interest - rather than profit or technological innovation - as the driving force at the heart of the corporation's future.
Clearly, public value is winning some serious arguments - ones that museums need to win too.
Julie Nightingale is a freelance journalist
Bolton research: www.mlanorthwest.org.uk/mlanorthwest/publications/
John Holden's report: www.demos.co.uk/publications/culturallegitimacy