In 1857, well over a million people went to Manchester's Art Treasures of Great Britain - an exhibition of 'hidden treasures' if ever there was one, as most of the works were borrowed from the nation's private stately homes.
It might not be possible to mount an exhibition like that today - but the UK's museums still have a fabulous trove of objects that aren't exploited. They could form the basis of some exciting exhibitions as well as books, catalogues and content for TV programmes and websites.
At a professional level, the idea that museums could make more of objects in store is not in question. It is one of the key recommendations of the Museums Association's (MA) Collections for the Future report, resulting from a year-long inquiry involving the UK's museums and galleries.
The MA's call was echoed last month by the MDA (the former Museum Documentation Association, now repositioning itself to deal with a range of collections management issues).
The MDA's Collections for All report reiterates the MA's call 'to develop clear and realistic recommendations about the future direction of documentation and knowledge management'. While both reports are partly intended to persuade politicians, they are also designed to gee up museums.
Some museums have amassed cataloguing backlogs over the years, with big gaps in their collections knowledge; others have accurate records, but they are only partially digitised. Despite a series of projects, particularly the New Opportunities Fund's Digitise programme, relatively few museums have complete catalogues online.
Curators and conservators are also arguing for the need to link types of the collections - for example transport collections - through single portals. But if some museums are doubtful about the collections they hold, or have no easy means of communicating the information they have, how will other museums - let alone the public - find ways of using stored collections?
'It's important that we have a coherent strategy of collections management across the country without the cost being prohibitive,' says Jane Glaister, Bradford council's head of arts, heritage and leisure, who headed the MA's Collections for the Future steering group.
'Not everyone needs to spend their lives cataloguing to the nth degree, but we do need to know what we have, and have the information stored in an accessible and consistent manner.'
Glaister argues that this lack of information is stopping regional museums collaborating as well as they should, particularly on exhibitions and publications.
Although there are examples of partnerships at regional level - such as the Esmée Fairbairn/Heritage Lottery Fund-supported collaborations between the National Gallery, the Laing Art Gallery and the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery and the current ceramics exhibitions at York, Scarborough and Wakefield - these are the exceptions rather than the rule.
'Take fine art,' Glaister says. 'Most museums have at least a few really good, interesting pieces. Put them together with other objects from other collections and all of a sudden you may have 30 or so really good pieces, and suddenly there's enough for an exhibition.
But instead we are constantly taking shows from London and not developing our own.' It is something that the hubs are now beginning to address.
At a strategic level, the obvious organisations to be thinking about all this are the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) and the MDA. The MLA has long had the Cornucopia website, telling museum staff and the public what kind of collections different museums and galleries hold.
The drawback is that Cornucopia does not go down to the level of individual items, the level an interested member of the public or an exhibition producer may require.
Chris Turner, the MLA's ICT adviser, is working on the development of Cornucopia, adding more detailed information from around the regions, plus collections in libraries and archives. Technically he is working on 'interoperability' (making sure the data can be used easily for different purposes) and making it easy to update.
But it still won't supply object-level data - if you want that it will be a case of clicking through to individual museum collections, or more likely, picking up the phone and tracking down the relevant curator.
The MLA is already thinking beyond Cornucopia: its current interest is in something loosely called 'the Knowledge Web'. The concept is to make sure first that museums and other cultural bodies construct and index data and databases in such a way that information can be easily used by particular user groups, whether PhD students, schoolchildren or members of specialist historic societies.
In a trial launch this month, the People's Network Discover services will act, in Turner's words, as a 'Google for a set of cultural data'. Unlike Google it will be able to interrogate databases and is only dealing with a set of high-quality, relevant data.
Nick Poole, the director of the MDA, which manages documentation standards, argues that the next step is to think carefully about who all this data is for. 'A lot of the work is technology-driven but I don't think we are thinking enough about what is needed, or demanded or editorially useful.'
Take documentation backlogs, he argues. In one sense, documentation is never finished, so it is important to think about what information the museum really needs, or its public really needs, and address that in the first instance.
'And as far as the public goes, we need to think and act more like publishers or broadcasters and find out about the markets we could be exploiting. Either that, or work directly with TV or publishing houses that understand the different ways that our content could be used.'
Meanwhile, as the strategic debate evolves, some people are simply getting on and doing things. The MLA has funded 17 subject specialist networks. It will open a new funding round this month: and given that 38 groups applied for start-up grants last year, and 20 for implementation grants, bidding is likely to be brisk.
An important part of each network's remit is not only to strengthen specialist knowledge but to find ways of disseminating what knowledge there already is. Abigail Walker, the MLA's senior Renaissance policy adviser, says the problem is that too much knowledge-sharing relies on personal contacts.
'There's nothing wrong, of course, with colleagues picking up phones to each other, the problem is that many museums have staff who don't know how to enter the loop. And anyway, there's always new information to be brought to the discussion.'
Perhaps the dark horse of the whole knowledge-swapping business - among museums at least - is the Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF), often confused with the separate National Inventory of European Paintings 1200-1900. The latter is steadily producing an exhaustive, academically researched database of all the nation's pre-1900, European oil paintings.
By 2007 it hopes to have catalogued collections from the UK's smaller museums, while the project leader, Andrew Greg, is fundraising to add the larger and better known collections of museums such as the Manchester Art Gallery and the Fitzwilliam.
While the National Inventory will be no doubt useful to interested members of the public, its most significant benefit is likely to be for the museums, opening up possibilities for loans, exhibitions and catalogues.
The PCF is a far less academic operation that aims to catalogue all oil paintings held in public collections in the UK, region by region. It was started because of the surprised discovery by one man - Fred Hohler - that it is not so easy to find out what even large museums hold.
Since the first book was published, under the directorship of Andrew Ellis in 2004, the PCF has produced four more catalogues - most recently East Sussex - with many more to come until the project is completed in about ten years' time.
Essentially, the PCF goes into a region's museums and other public collections, digitally photographing pictures. The foundation takes the museum's own (not always complete) information and publishes the basics in the illustrated catalogue, priced at £20.
'I'm a great supporter,' says Charles Saumarez Smith, the director of the National Gallery and a Public Catalogue Foundation trustee. 'I think museum people were sceptical at first, and there is no denying it can be a lot of work for the museum to find the information, and it obviously turns up inaccuracies.'
The point, he says, is the PCF is a big step forward. 'It's not long ago that I asked a museum in the south east what paintings they had and eventually they dug out and posted me a catalogue printed in the 1950s. How are we going to work with each other if we've no idea what we have?'
The interesting thing is that it is not just museum staff who want to know about these things, it's the public too. It is the public that is mostly buying the PCF catalogue and this interest is reflected in the fact that the BBC is currently working on a series featuring 'hidden treasures' from the UK's regional museums.
And a Culture Online-funded website will soon launch based on the 'icons' of England that is likely to include some surprising museum objects.
How best can museums make the most of the their stored collections? It may not be Art Treasures of Great Britain but there must be something better than an object with a paper catalogue entry that even curators rarely see.
Jane Morris is a freelance arts journalist
Contacts:
Collections for the Future: www.museumsassociation.org/ma/11116
MDA: www.mda.org.uk or www.collectionsforall.org.uk
Esmée Fairbairn Regional Museums Initiative: www.esmeefairbairn.org.uk/ strategic_rmi.html
Cornucopia: www.cornucopia.org.uk
MLA (Subject specialist networks): www.mla.gov.uk (choose Action, Renaissance)
People's Network Discover service: www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk
Icons: www.icons.org.uk
Museum Practice 32, which will be published in December, features a series of articles about touring exhibitions
Subject Specialist Networks
This time last year, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council provided almost £248,000 to fund a mix of established and start-up Subject Specialist Networks.
An important part of the networks' role is to identify ways of improving specialist knowledge and making sure that knowledge can be captured, so it isn't lost the minute an expert leaves the museum or retires.
A number of networks are considering database and internet solutions, as well as training and professional workshops. The networks include:
Public transport
Jewish history, culture and religious life
British cartoons, comics and caricatures
Urban social history
British archaeology
Fashion and textiles
Medicine and healthcare
Disability history
Natural sciences
Science, technology and industry
Children's literature and illustration
Design: 1950-2000
Japanese metalwork
Tibetan and Himalayan objects
Photography
Crime, law, prisons and police
Screen heritage
Rural museums
Egyptology
Sports heritage
Archaeology
Theatre
Museum ethnographers
Ceramics
It might not be possible to mount an exhibition like that today - but the UK's museums still have a fabulous trove of objects that aren't exploited. They could form the basis of some exciting exhibitions as well as books, catalogues and content for TV programmes and websites.
At a professional level, the idea that museums could make more of objects in store is not in question. It is one of the key recommendations of the Museums Association's (MA) Collections for the Future report, resulting from a year-long inquiry involving the UK's museums and galleries.
The MA's call was echoed last month by the MDA (the former Museum Documentation Association, now repositioning itself to deal with a range of collections management issues).
The MDA's Collections for All report reiterates the MA's call 'to develop clear and realistic recommendations about the future direction of documentation and knowledge management'. While both reports are partly intended to persuade politicians, they are also designed to gee up museums.
Some museums have amassed cataloguing backlogs over the years, with big gaps in their collections knowledge; others have accurate records, but they are only partially digitised. Despite a series of projects, particularly the New Opportunities Fund's Digitise programme, relatively few museums have complete catalogues online.
Curators and conservators are also arguing for the need to link types of the collections - for example transport collections - through single portals. But if some museums are doubtful about the collections they hold, or have no easy means of communicating the information they have, how will other museums - let alone the public - find ways of using stored collections?
'It's important that we have a coherent strategy of collections management across the country without the cost being prohibitive,' says Jane Glaister, Bradford council's head of arts, heritage and leisure, who headed the MA's Collections for the Future steering group.
'Not everyone needs to spend their lives cataloguing to the nth degree, but we do need to know what we have, and have the information stored in an accessible and consistent manner.'
Glaister argues that this lack of information is stopping regional museums collaborating as well as they should, particularly on exhibitions and publications.
Although there are examples of partnerships at regional level - such as the Esmée Fairbairn/Heritage Lottery Fund-supported collaborations between the National Gallery, the Laing Art Gallery and the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery and the current ceramics exhibitions at York, Scarborough and Wakefield - these are the exceptions rather than the rule.
'Take fine art,' Glaister says. 'Most museums have at least a few really good, interesting pieces. Put them together with other objects from other collections and all of a sudden you may have 30 or so really good pieces, and suddenly there's enough for an exhibition.
But instead we are constantly taking shows from London and not developing our own.' It is something that the hubs are now beginning to address.
At a strategic level, the obvious organisations to be thinking about all this are the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) and the MDA. The MLA has long had the Cornucopia website, telling museum staff and the public what kind of collections different museums and galleries hold.
The drawback is that Cornucopia does not go down to the level of individual items, the level an interested member of the public or an exhibition producer may require.
Chris Turner, the MLA's ICT adviser, is working on the development of Cornucopia, adding more detailed information from around the regions, plus collections in libraries and archives. Technically he is working on 'interoperability' (making sure the data can be used easily for different purposes) and making it easy to update.
But it still won't supply object-level data - if you want that it will be a case of clicking through to individual museum collections, or more likely, picking up the phone and tracking down the relevant curator.
The MLA is already thinking beyond Cornucopia: its current interest is in something loosely called 'the Knowledge Web'. The concept is to make sure first that museums and other cultural bodies construct and index data and databases in such a way that information can be easily used by particular user groups, whether PhD students, schoolchildren or members of specialist historic societies.
In a trial launch this month, the People's Network Discover services will act, in Turner's words, as a 'Google for a set of cultural data'. Unlike Google it will be able to interrogate databases and is only dealing with a set of high-quality, relevant data.
Nick Poole, the director of the MDA, which manages documentation standards, argues that the next step is to think carefully about who all this data is for. 'A lot of the work is technology-driven but I don't think we are thinking enough about what is needed, or demanded or editorially useful.'
Take documentation backlogs, he argues. In one sense, documentation is never finished, so it is important to think about what information the museum really needs, or its public really needs, and address that in the first instance.
'And as far as the public goes, we need to think and act more like publishers or broadcasters and find out about the markets we could be exploiting. Either that, or work directly with TV or publishing houses that understand the different ways that our content could be used.'
Meanwhile, as the strategic debate evolves, some people are simply getting on and doing things. The MLA has funded 17 subject specialist networks. It will open a new funding round this month: and given that 38 groups applied for start-up grants last year, and 20 for implementation grants, bidding is likely to be brisk.
An important part of each network's remit is not only to strengthen specialist knowledge but to find ways of disseminating what knowledge there already is. Abigail Walker, the MLA's senior Renaissance policy adviser, says the problem is that too much knowledge-sharing relies on personal contacts.
'There's nothing wrong, of course, with colleagues picking up phones to each other, the problem is that many museums have staff who don't know how to enter the loop. And anyway, there's always new information to be brought to the discussion.'
Perhaps the dark horse of the whole knowledge-swapping business - among museums at least - is the Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF), often confused with the separate National Inventory of European Paintings 1200-1900. The latter is steadily producing an exhaustive, academically researched database of all the nation's pre-1900, European oil paintings.
By 2007 it hopes to have catalogued collections from the UK's smaller museums, while the project leader, Andrew Greg, is fundraising to add the larger and better known collections of museums such as the Manchester Art Gallery and the Fitzwilliam.
While the National Inventory will be no doubt useful to interested members of the public, its most significant benefit is likely to be for the museums, opening up possibilities for loans, exhibitions and catalogues.
The PCF is a far less academic operation that aims to catalogue all oil paintings held in public collections in the UK, region by region. It was started because of the surprised discovery by one man - Fred Hohler - that it is not so easy to find out what even large museums hold.
Since the first book was published, under the directorship of Andrew Ellis in 2004, the PCF has produced four more catalogues - most recently East Sussex - with many more to come until the project is completed in about ten years' time.
Essentially, the PCF goes into a region's museums and other public collections, digitally photographing pictures. The foundation takes the museum's own (not always complete) information and publishes the basics in the illustrated catalogue, priced at £20.
'I'm a great supporter,' says Charles Saumarez Smith, the director of the National Gallery and a Public Catalogue Foundation trustee. 'I think museum people were sceptical at first, and there is no denying it can be a lot of work for the museum to find the information, and it obviously turns up inaccuracies.'
The point, he says, is the PCF is a big step forward. 'It's not long ago that I asked a museum in the south east what paintings they had and eventually they dug out and posted me a catalogue printed in the 1950s. How are we going to work with each other if we've no idea what we have?'
The interesting thing is that it is not just museum staff who want to know about these things, it's the public too. It is the public that is mostly buying the PCF catalogue and this interest is reflected in the fact that the BBC is currently working on a series featuring 'hidden treasures' from the UK's regional museums.
And a Culture Online-funded website will soon launch based on the 'icons' of England that is likely to include some surprising museum objects.
How best can museums make the most of the their stored collections? It may not be Art Treasures of Great Britain but there must be something better than an object with a paper catalogue entry that even curators rarely see.
Jane Morris is a freelance arts journalist
Contacts:
Collections for the Future: www.museumsassociation.org/ma/11116
MDA: www.mda.org.uk or www.collectionsforall.org.uk
Esmée Fairbairn Regional Museums Initiative: www.esmeefairbairn.org.uk/ strategic_rmi.html
Cornucopia: www.cornucopia.org.uk
MLA (Subject specialist networks): www.mla.gov.uk (choose Action, Renaissance)
People's Network Discover service: www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk
Icons: www.icons.org.uk
Museum Practice 32, which will be published in December, features a series of articles about touring exhibitions
Subject Specialist Networks
This time last year, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council provided almost £248,000 to fund a mix of established and start-up Subject Specialist Networks.
An important part of the networks' role is to identify ways of improving specialist knowledge and making sure that knowledge can be captured, so it isn't lost the minute an expert leaves the museum or retires.
A number of networks are considering database and internet solutions, as well as training and professional workshops. The networks include:
Public transport
Jewish history, culture and religious life
British cartoons, comics and caricatures
Urban social history
British archaeology
Fashion and textiles
Medicine and healthcare
Disability history
Natural sciences
Science, technology and industry
Children's literature and illustration
Design: 1950-2000
Japanese metalwork
Tibetan and Himalayan objects
Photography
Crime, law, prisons and police
Screen heritage
Rural museums
Egyptology
Sports heritage
Archaeology
Theatre
Museum ethnographers
Ceramics
