'We are the slaves of objects around us and appear little or important according as these contract or give us room to expand,' according to Goethe's popularly quoted sentiment.
Museums perhaps take the view that more in the collections equals more important, rather than making it too cramped to move. The Museums Association's (MA) recently published Collections for the Future report shines a welcome and long-awaited light into those over-full stores.
The general public, trustees, other museum stakeholders, and even museum colleagues who do not work with collections, are quite baffled by the existence of so much stuff that is not displayed.
They often ask: 'Why do you have collections when you can't put them in exhibitions?' or, boldly: 'Why don't you let some of the collections go to private owners who will appreciate them, then?'
Is the claim from museums that the collections are central to what they do just so much rhetorical bluff? There are in fact many examples of ways to use collections, but as yet little perception of them as a useful resource.
Collections are not a uniform mass. A great functional distance separates the pictures in the National Gallery - just over 2,000 of them - from the 70 million specimens in the Natural History Museum.
In that gap we find science and industry objects, and often very large, history, ethnography and military collections that relate to people and places, and the myriad other varieties of collection and objects. Each type of collection arguably has a different sort of utility.
Research
This is the primary purpose of some types of collection, such as natural history and archaeology collections. Natural history collections in particular tend to be well used for research. The entomology collection at the Natural History Museum routinely has a staggering 145,000 objects out on loan for taxonomic research.
Archaeology collections are accessed far less, since archaeology is not as economically relevant and is not an established scientific discipline. But surely all museum collections should be used for research by a wide range of people, as are archives in record offices.
Education
The recent Department for Culture, Media and Sport consultation paper, Understanding the Future: Museums and 21st Century Life, usefully focused on higher and ongoing education and learning.
'It's a lot easier to remember what we are learning when we discuss an object,' a student on an MA course run by the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford said of the 17th-century measure that was the focus of the seminar.
Although some courses make use of collections, most do not. This would require museums to enter into partnerships where others, such as universities, take the lead - something that museums have not easily achieved in the past.
Ongoing adult learning events and programmes could make much more use of collections, which does already happen in some museums. In general these uses require collections professionals to adopt an enabling role, rather than their current guardianship one.
Memory and identity
There is a lot of academic literature on the place of objects in memory. One view is that collections can be seen as the brain of the museum, exhibitions the voice.
Museums are important players in fostering collective memory, which promotes social cohesion and a sense of belonging - or of exclusion if one feels that one's past and culture is not represented.
Respondents to a 1991 survey in London had all sorts of interests relating to museum objects - two Afro-Caribbean visitors said: 'We live locally, we have black people around and Asians and white people so I mean we could have things from each culture. That would be interesting.' And: 'Just to show things how they were because you can't see them now, it is to remind us of the past.'
At an individual level there are many examples of people being deeply moved by encountering objects, particularly those in military collections and ethnography collections. There is a growing use of collections for work with the elderly, although this usually draws on special handling collections.
Creativity
It is clear that the worlds of art and design would be much the poorer without museum collections. Artists love collections: they use them for inspiration, as subjects and as media.
Collections also appear in literature, including poetry; films; architecture (there are imaginative buildings designed for museum storage); music and sound; technology; and design. In his poem, The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, James Fenton, wrote of the collections on view there: 'Yes, You have come upon the fabled lands where myths, Go when they die.'
Couldn't museums let a lot more poets and artists into the stores? The public draws on collections for creative purposes too, something that could be enthusiastically encouraged.
Enjoyment
'I'd rather see all this, than a quarter displayed properly,' said a visitor to the Warehouse, the National Railway Museum's (NRM) open store in York. Consultants advised the NRM to 'market the mystery'. Visits to stores can be popular events: 1,500 people enquired about going to the Science Museum's stores within a day of them going public.
We can go further than this. In Glasgow's Open Museum project, people are given the chance not just to collect more stuff, which is quite usual, but also to use the permanent collections on the same basis as museum professionals.
The public make exhibitions and events in places outside the museum. This implies an openness to the use of collections that is far beyond what is commonly the case.
The value of collections
Unlike museums themselves, the collections do not have economic values - they are the cultural capital from which the museum must create value for the present and future.
Activities involving collections result in experiences of depth and quality, not in large numbers of people through the door. Therefore it is important that museums articulate their cultural value as well as the economic arguments that are so familiar.
In 2000, Rick van der Ploeg, the Dutch minister for culture said: 'The shareholders of the Collectie Nederland - and they are the Dutch taxpayers - should be able to assume that the cultural entrepreneurs who curate the public cultural fortune… attempt to gain the maximum profits from their input.
Not of course for the sake of financial gain. But for the sake of the social and cultural returns that expresses itself for instance through an optimal accessibility and utilisation of the Collectie Nederland for the whole of society.'
The future for collections
Collections centres, disposal, loans and more exhibits are among the proposals to make better use of collections. Collections centres might be less expensive than some options, but would they generate more use of collections?
Disposals were tackled head on by Mark Jones, the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, as part of the National Museum Directors' Conference's 2003 report Too Much Stuff? The conclusion was that there probably is too much stuff, but disposing of it on any useful scale would be expensive and difficult.
Keith Thomson, in his 2002 book Treasures on Earth, said museum collections are quite a bad thing - they take stuff away from people who would really appreciate it, and push up prices so collectors can't afford to buy. He seemed to favour returning some to private ownership.
There is a plan in the Netherlands to identify the Collectie Nederland, the national collection, and to get objects out into unusual places by encouraging many more loans. This is costly, and uses only a few objects.
A former director of the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands, Henk van Os, bluntly wrote: 'The real problem is the unimaginative programming, failure of public relations or sheer lack of courage which prevents museum staff from making the best use of their stores and keeps the public away.'
Another view is that of Mark Dion, an installation artist who has worked extensively with museum collections. 'The museum needs to be turned inside out - the back rooms put on exhibition and the displays put into storage.'
There are strategic implications for museums if they are truly to enable people to engage with their collections. Their organisational culture would be profoundly affected.
Rather than being guardians of collections, museums would see themselves as facilitators of engagement with them. Rather than storing static collections, the museums would see them as a service.
Rather than seeing themselves as separate from other organisations, museums would perform as just some of the players in networks of services and provision for research, learning, creativity, enjoyment and leisure.
Full engagement with other organisations is crucial. In this new approach, success for the museum might be measured not by the outputs it produced itself, but by outputs from other organisations that have drawn on museum collections resources. That, perhaps, is where the real future for collections lies.
Suzanne Keene is the author of Fragments of the World: Uses of Museum Collections. She researches and runs the museum studies MA at University College London
Understanding the Future: Museums and 21st Century Life: www.culture.gov.uk
Collections for the Future: www.museumsassociation.org/collectionsforthefuture
Too Much Stuff? Disposal from Museums: nationalmuseums.org.uk
Museums perhaps take the view that more in the collections equals more important, rather than making it too cramped to move. The Museums Association's (MA) recently published Collections for the Future report shines a welcome and long-awaited light into those over-full stores.
The general public, trustees, other museum stakeholders, and even museum colleagues who do not work with collections, are quite baffled by the existence of so much stuff that is not displayed.
They often ask: 'Why do you have collections when you can't put them in exhibitions?' or, boldly: 'Why don't you let some of the collections go to private owners who will appreciate them, then?'
Is the claim from museums that the collections are central to what they do just so much rhetorical bluff? There are in fact many examples of ways to use collections, but as yet little perception of them as a useful resource.
Collections are not a uniform mass. A great functional distance separates the pictures in the National Gallery - just over 2,000 of them - from the 70 million specimens in the Natural History Museum.
In that gap we find science and industry objects, and often very large, history, ethnography and military collections that relate to people and places, and the myriad other varieties of collection and objects. Each type of collection arguably has a different sort of utility.
Research
This is the primary purpose of some types of collection, such as natural history and archaeology collections. Natural history collections in particular tend to be well used for research. The entomology collection at the Natural History Museum routinely has a staggering 145,000 objects out on loan for taxonomic research.
Archaeology collections are accessed far less, since archaeology is not as economically relevant and is not an established scientific discipline. But surely all museum collections should be used for research by a wide range of people, as are archives in record offices.
Education
The recent Department for Culture, Media and Sport consultation paper, Understanding the Future: Museums and 21st Century Life, usefully focused on higher and ongoing education and learning.
'It's a lot easier to remember what we are learning when we discuss an object,' a student on an MA course run by the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford said of the 17th-century measure that was the focus of the seminar.
Although some courses make use of collections, most do not. This would require museums to enter into partnerships where others, such as universities, take the lead - something that museums have not easily achieved in the past.
Ongoing adult learning events and programmes could make much more use of collections, which does already happen in some museums. In general these uses require collections professionals to adopt an enabling role, rather than their current guardianship one.
Memory and identity
There is a lot of academic literature on the place of objects in memory. One view is that collections can be seen as the brain of the museum, exhibitions the voice.
Museums are important players in fostering collective memory, which promotes social cohesion and a sense of belonging - or of exclusion if one feels that one's past and culture is not represented.
Respondents to a 1991 survey in London had all sorts of interests relating to museum objects - two Afro-Caribbean visitors said: 'We live locally, we have black people around and Asians and white people so I mean we could have things from each culture. That would be interesting.' And: 'Just to show things how they were because you can't see them now, it is to remind us of the past.'
At an individual level there are many examples of people being deeply moved by encountering objects, particularly those in military collections and ethnography collections. There is a growing use of collections for work with the elderly, although this usually draws on special handling collections.
Creativity
It is clear that the worlds of art and design would be much the poorer without museum collections. Artists love collections: they use them for inspiration, as subjects and as media.
Collections also appear in literature, including poetry; films; architecture (there are imaginative buildings designed for museum storage); music and sound; technology; and design. In his poem, The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, James Fenton, wrote of the collections on view there: 'Yes, You have come upon the fabled lands where myths, Go when they die.'
Couldn't museums let a lot more poets and artists into the stores? The public draws on collections for creative purposes too, something that could be enthusiastically encouraged.
Enjoyment
'I'd rather see all this, than a quarter displayed properly,' said a visitor to the Warehouse, the National Railway Museum's (NRM) open store in York. Consultants advised the NRM to 'market the mystery'. Visits to stores can be popular events: 1,500 people enquired about going to the Science Museum's stores within a day of them going public.
We can go further than this. In Glasgow's Open Museum project, people are given the chance not just to collect more stuff, which is quite usual, but also to use the permanent collections on the same basis as museum professionals.
The public make exhibitions and events in places outside the museum. This implies an openness to the use of collections that is far beyond what is commonly the case.
The value of collections
Unlike museums themselves, the collections do not have economic values - they are the cultural capital from which the museum must create value for the present and future.
Activities involving collections result in experiences of depth and quality, not in large numbers of people through the door. Therefore it is important that museums articulate their cultural value as well as the economic arguments that are so familiar.
In 2000, Rick van der Ploeg, the Dutch minister for culture said: 'The shareholders of the Collectie Nederland - and they are the Dutch taxpayers - should be able to assume that the cultural entrepreneurs who curate the public cultural fortune… attempt to gain the maximum profits from their input.
Not of course for the sake of financial gain. But for the sake of the social and cultural returns that expresses itself for instance through an optimal accessibility and utilisation of the Collectie Nederland for the whole of society.'
The future for collections
Collections centres, disposal, loans and more exhibits are among the proposals to make better use of collections. Collections centres might be less expensive than some options, but would they generate more use of collections?
Disposals were tackled head on by Mark Jones, the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, as part of the National Museum Directors' Conference's 2003 report Too Much Stuff? The conclusion was that there probably is too much stuff, but disposing of it on any useful scale would be expensive and difficult.
Keith Thomson, in his 2002 book Treasures on Earth, said museum collections are quite a bad thing - they take stuff away from people who would really appreciate it, and push up prices so collectors can't afford to buy. He seemed to favour returning some to private ownership.
There is a plan in the Netherlands to identify the Collectie Nederland, the national collection, and to get objects out into unusual places by encouraging many more loans. This is costly, and uses only a few objects.
A former director of the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands, Henk van Os, bluntly wrote: 'The real problem is the unimaginative programming, failure of public relations or sheer lack of courage which prevents museum staff from making the best use of their stores and keeps the public away.'
Another view is that of Mark Dion, an installation artist who has worked extensively with museum collections. 'The museum needs to be turned inside out - the back rooms put on exhibition and the displays put into storage.'
There are strategic implications for museums if they are truly to enable people to engage with their collections. Their organisational culture would be profoundly affected.
Rather than being guardians of collections, museums would see themselves as facilitators of engagement with them. Rather than storing static collections, the museums would see them as a service.
Rather than seeing themselves as separate from other organisations, museums would perform as just some of the players in networks of services and provision for research, learning, creativity, enjoyment and leisure.
Full engagement with other organisations is crucial. In this new approach, success for the museum might be measured not by the outputs it produced itself, but by outputs from other organisations that have drawn on museum collections resources. That, perhaps, is where the real future for collections lies.
Suzanne Keene is the author of Fragments of the World: Uses of Museum Collections. She researches and runs the museum studies MA at University College London
Understanding the Future: Museums and 21st Century Life: www.culture.gov.uk
Collections for the Future: www.museumsassociation.org/collectionsforthefuture
Too Much Stuff? Disposal from Museums: nationalmuseums.org.uk
