Most industries use awards to recognise and promote excellence. Film has the Baftas, publishing has the Man Booker, even supermarkets have one - the Grocer awards.
Museums and galleries are no exception and this month sees the announcement of the 10-strong longlist for the sector's highest-profile gong, the £100,000 Art Fund prize for museums and galleries (see box below).
The prize was known as the Gulbenkian after the name of its previous sponsor, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, but has changed its name now the Art Fund is stumping up the cash. The prize attracts coverage in the national media, has a celebrity judge in BBC broadcaster Sue MacGregor, and sees some of the UK's biggest museums being pitted against far smaller operations.
It may be the best known, but the Art Fund prize is not the only museum and gallery award. Others include the Sandford Award for Heritage Education, the European Museum of the Year, and the Axa Art Exhibition Catalogue Award.
Awards broadly fall into three categories: the big-money, prestigious prizes that attract national press coverage; industry-focused awards that are virtually unknown outside their sector; and prizes that involve the general public, usually in nominating and judging winners.
The Art Fund prize, with its aspirations to be as recognisable as a museum-version of the Man Booker, is a self-consciously publicity seeking award. As Rosemary Ewles, prize administrator, says: "The purpose is not only to recognise the best the sector has to offer, but to spread the word among the public and bust the stereotype of the dusty old museum."
Raising profiles
The majority of the prizes in the museums industry fall into the second category and are unlikely to be more than minor blips on the public's radar.
The Jodi Awards recognise excellence in using technology to make cultural venues more accessible to disabled people, and while prizes such as this don't generate column inches in the same way as the Art Fund prize does, they do provide much-needed recognition to small museums and particular groups of staff.
The third type is typified by the Guardian Family-Friendly Museum award - where the public, supported by Kids in Museums and the Guardian newspaper, nominate and judge the institutions from a visitor's, rather than a museum professional's, point of view.
When it comes to something as public-facing as the Family Friendly Museum award or Art Fund prize, the winner is not the only one to reap the rewards.
"The real benefit is the high profile it gives museums and galleries," explains Mark Taylor, an Art Fund prize trustee and the director of the Museums Association. "It's on the 10 o'clock news, it's in the papers. It's all about national and local profile. Sure, £100,000 is good for any museum, but the value of the prize is much more than that."
Nick Dodd, the chief executive of Sheffield Galleries and Museums Trust (a Gulbenkian runner-up in 2007 for Weston Park Museum), agrees. "We did it as a means of raising the profile of the organisation and engaging the regional and national press, and it was hugely successful," he says. "We got a media partner in the Yorkshire Post, good coverage on the BBC, on websites, on regional TV, and good copy in the papers."
This exposure can lead to measurable benefits, as ss Great Britain found when it recorded a 30 per cent rise in visitors after winning the Gulbenkian Prize in 2006. "We're still feeling the effects," says director Matthew Tanner. "People are still talking about us - it's that word-of-mouth marketing that you just can't buy."
But it's not only about publicity. The benefits go beyond visitor numbers and press coverage. A prize, no matter what size, gives valuable recognition to museum staff. This can have a galvanising effect, according to Maureen McGregor, manager of learning and access at Ironbridge Gorge Museums, a collection of 10 museums in Shropshire:
"Winning the Sandford Award for Heritage Education has given the education staff here a tremendous boost. It recognises the importance of our work. Our own museums now have a better idea of what we do and get more involved."
Smaller awards certainly have an important role to play. "They recognise work that wouldn't normally see the light of day," says Taylor. "I think that providing awards get some sort of coverage, even if it is just within the museum world, that recognition goes a long way in an under-funded and undervalued sector."
This is confirmed by Susan Payne, a curator at Perth Museum and Art Gallery. With Tuula Pardoe from the Scottish Conservation Studio, she won a prize in the 2007 Conservation Awards, which are run by the Institute of Conservation.
"Winning it meant a huge deal, not just to us, but to the whole museum service. It brought so much recognition to us and everybody was so happy."
This sort of award can garner local coverage and be a benchmark for other museums to aim for. But most importantly, these industry awards motivate and encourage staff, many of whom are low paid or voluntary.
Another peripheral benefit of prizes, particularly smaller ones, is the knowledge-sharing that occurs, both within and between museum groups.
The UK-based European Museum of the Year award has no permanent prize at all - the winner gets to keep a small Henry Moore sculpture for the year - but it does facilitate a European-wide exchange of ideas at its annual conference. It's not often that Turkish and Greek museums get to talk shop, or that Balkan museums gather in one place.
Prizes can also lift the standards of the sector as a whole as institutions strive to meet the criteria of the various awards. Dea Birkett, the director of Kids in Museums, which runs the Family-Friendly Museum award, says:
"We want to put good practice to the forefront with our prize. All sorts of museum campaigning groups focus on the bad, but we celebrate what's going well and give examples of good practice."
Brand names
Of course, museums will always struggle to be as newsworthy as the cross-dressing Turner prize winner Grayson Perry or former drug addict and Booker winner DBC Pierre.
Also, unlike films or books, entrants cannot be taken away and dissected at the judges' leisure. With the exception of the European Museum of the Year award, the first round of all the prizes are judged on paper.
"There is often no correlation between the quality of the writing on an application and the quality of the museum," says the Art Fund prize judge Mark Miodownik. "You get some absolute gems that don't have anybody who can write an application."
Nor does quality of the application bear any relation to the size of the museum. While many small museums or galleries have a single person who is good at writing, some of the national museums' marketing departments just churn out PR fluff.
A further issue for the big awards are the close ties between prize and sponsor. Well-known ones such as the Art Fund and the Guardian Family-Friendly Museum prizes are so associated with their sponsors that any change can be confusing to the media and the public.
For many museum staff, and more importantly the public, the Art Fund prize is still known as the Gulbenkian and there is still some confusion as to whether the Art Fund prize is the same thing.
"That is the compromise you have to make in order to have a big prize," explains Taylor. "We could easily have a Museum of the Year prize, but we would get diddley-squat for it because nobody will sponsor it unless they have their name on it."
With the change of sponsor on the Art Fund prize there are fears that the focus will shift towards more art-related projects. This is denied by Art Fund director David Barrie. "Obviously our purpose in life is to promote the collecting of art in museums and galleries, so we were quite keen to put a bit of an emphasis on that," he says.
"But it is a broadening of the criteria rather than a narrowing. We want this to be a prize that recognises outstanding achievement in museums and galleries."
Although the Art Fund has only initially committed to two years of sponsorship, its prize has certainly raised the bar for museum awards since it started in 2003. So is there room for any new prizes?
Nick Dodd from Sheffield thinks that there should be more large PR-focused awards. "There is space for a few really big awards - the industry could tolerate about three," he says. "That would allow you to award a prize to an art gallery and a museum as they are both quite distinct."
The recognition and motivation brought by prizes of all sizes to institutions can invigorate the whole industry. They attract people to museums and galleries and drive up standards, which in turn brings more people in.
It is a virtuous, if fragile, circle, almost wholly dependent on one or two well-known awards to maintain the national and international profile of UK museums and galleries outside of the big London institutions.
Aaron Davies is a freelance journalist
A year's worth of winners
The Gulbenkian (now Art Fund prize)
Pallant House Gallery, West Sussex
"Winning the Gulbenkian prize for museums and galleries in 2007 generated enormous interest and the feedback we received after winning the award has been tremendous, both in terms of publicity and visitor numbers."
Stefan van Raay, director, Pallant House Gallery
The Guardian Family-Friendly Museum award
Falmouth Art Gallery, Cornwall
"We were very pleased to win the award because it is the audience who vote for it, which means it's not an elitist award in any way. We were also very happy with the publicity and national recognition that it brought."
Alex Hooper, assistant curator, Falmouth Art Gallery
Best Industrial or Technological Museum 2007 at the European Museum of the Year
ss Great Britain, Bristol
"We haven't made as much of it as I would have liked, but it was good to get European acknowledgement as well as UK acknowledgement."
Matthew Tanner, director, ss Great Britain
The Conservation awards 2007
Susan Payne from the Perth Museum and Art Gallery and Tuula Pardoe from the Scottish Conservation Studio won the award for conservation
Jodi award for Excellence in Accessible Technology
Wolverhampton Arts and Museums Service
"We were bowled over. The award is a wonderful recognition."
Linda Ellis, ICT development officer, Wolverhampton Arts and Museums Service
The Art Newspaper and Axa Art Catalogue prize
The Wallace Collection, London
"The award has brought excellent publicity for the collection and has been a great boost for morale. The catalogue involved staff in all sorts of ways, allowing people to use their talents - the first ever translation of Xanto's sonnets into English in the catalogue was done by one of our library staff."
Jeremy Warren, assistant director and head of collections, the Wallace Collection
Sandford Awards for Heritage Education
Ironbridge Gorge Museums, Shropshire; Geffrye Museum, London
Museums and galleries are no exception and this month sees the announcement of the 10-strong longlist for the sector's highest-profile gong, the £100,000 Art Fund prize for museums and galleries (see box below).
The prize was known as the Gulbenkian after the name of its previous sponsor, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, but has changed its name now the Art Fund is stumping up the cash. The prize attracts coverage in the national media, has a celebrity judge in BBC broadcaster Sue MacGregor, and sees some of the UK's biggest museums being pitted against far smaller operations.
It may be the best known, but the Art Fund prize is not the only museum and gallery award. Others include the Sandford Award for Heritage Education, the European Museum of the Year, and the Axa Art Exhibition Catalogue Award.
Awards broadly fall into three categories: the big-money, prestigious prizes that attract national press coverage; industry-focused awards that are virtually unknown outside their sector; and prizes that involve the general public, usually in nominating and judging winners.
The Art Fund prize, with its aspirations to be as recognisable as a museum-version of the Man Booker, is a self-consciously publicity seeking award. As Rosemary Ewles, prize administrator, says: "The purpose is not only to recognise the best the sector has to offer, but to spread the word among the public and bust the stereotype of the dusty old museum."
Raising profiles
The majority of the prizes in the museums industry fall into the second category and are unlikely to be more than minor blips on the public's radar.
The Jodi Awards recognise excellence in using technology to make cultural venues more accessible to disabled people, and while prizes such as this don't generate column inches in the same way as the Art Fund prize does, they do provide much-needed recognition to small museums and particular groups of staff.
The third type is typified by the Guardian Family-Friendly Museum award - where the public, supported by Kids in Museums and the Guardian newspaper, nominate and judge the institutions from a visitor's, rather than a museum professional's, point of view.
When it comes to something as public-facing as the Family Friendly Museum award or Art Fund prize, the winner is not the only one to reap the rewards.
"The real benefit is the high profile it gives museums and galleries," explains Mark Taylor, an Art Fund prize trustee and the director of the Museums Association. "It's on the 10 o'clock news, it's in the papers. It's all about national and local profile. Sure, £100,000 is good for any museum, but the value of the prize is much more than that."
Nick Dodd, the chief executive of Sheffield Galleries and Museums Trust (a Gulbenkian runner-up in 2007 for Weston Park Museum), agrees. "We did it as a means of raising the profile of the organisation and engaging the regional and national press, and it was hugely successful," he says. "We got a media partner in the Yorkshire Post, good coverage on the BBC, on websites, on regional TV, and good copy in the papers."
This exposure can lead to measurable benefits, as ss Great Britain found when it recorded a 30 per cent rise in visitors after winning the Gulbenkian Prize in 2006. "We're still feeling the effects," says director Matthew Tanner. "People are still talking about us - it's that word-of-mouth marketing that you just can't buy."
But it's not only about publicity. The benefits go beyond visitor numbers and press coverage. A prize, no matter what size, gives valuable recognition to museum staff. This can have a galvanising effect, according to Maureen McGregor, manager of learning and access at Ironbridge Gorge Museums, a collection of 10 museums in Shropshire:
"Winning the Sandford Award for Heritage Education has given the education staff here a tremendous boost. It recognises the importance of our work. Our own museums now have a better idea of what we do and get more involved."
Smaller awards certainly have an important role to play. "They recognise work that wouldn't normally see the light of day," says Taylor. "I think that providing awards get some sort of coverage, even if it is just within the museum world, that recognition goes a long way in an under-funded and undervalued sector."
This is confirmed by Susan Payne, a curator at Perth Museum and Art Gallery. With Tuula Pardoe from the Scottish Conservation Studio, she won a prize in the 2007 Conservation Awards, which are run by the Institute of Conservation.
"Winning it meant a huge deal, not just to us, but to the whole museum service. It brought so much recognition to us and everybody was so happy."
This sort of award can garner local coverage and be a benchmark for other museums to aim for. But most importantly, these industry awards motivate and encourage staff, many of whom are low paid or voluntary.
Another peripheral benefit of prizes, particularly smaller ones, is the knowledge-sharing that occurs, both within and between museum groups.
The UK-based European Museum of the Year award has no permanent prize at all - the winner gets to keep a small Henry Moore sculpture for the year - but it does facilitate a European-wide exchange of ideas at its annual conference. It's not often that Turkish and Greek museums get to talk shop, or that Balkan museums gather in one place.
Prizes can also lift the standards of the sector as a whole as institutions strive to meet the criteria of the various awards. Dea Birkett, the director of Kids in Museums, which runs the Family-Friendly Museum award, says:
"We want to put good practice to the forefront with our prize. All sorts of museum campaigning groups focus on the bad, but we celebrate what's going well and give examples of good practice."
Brand names
Of course, museums will always struggle to be as newsworthy as the cross-dressing Turner prize winner Grayson Perry or former drug addict and Booker winner DBC Pierre.
Also, unlike films or books, entrants cannot be taken away and dissected at the judges' leisure. With the exception of the European Museum of the Year award, the first round of all the prizes are judged on paper.
"There is often no correlation between the quality of the writing on an application and the quality of the museum," says the Art Fund prize judge Mark Miodownik. "You get some absolute gems that don't have anybody who can write an application."
Nor does quality of the application bear any relation to the size of the museum. While many small museums or galleries have a single person who is good at writing, some of the national museums' marketing departments just churn out PR fluff.
A further issue for the big awards are the close ties between prize and sponsor. Well-known ones such as the Art Fund and the Guardian Family-Friendly Museum prizes are so associated with their sponsors that any change can be confusing to the media and the public.
For many museum staff, and more importantly the public, the Art Fund prize is still known as the Gulbenkian and there is still some confusion as to whether the Art Fund prize is the same thing.
"That is the compromise you have to make in order to have a big prize," explains Taylor. "We could easily have a Museum of the Year prize, but we would get diddley-squat for it because nobody will sponsor it unless they have their name on it."
With the change of sponsor on the Art Fund prize there are fears that the focus will shift towards more art-related projects. This is denied by Art Fund director David Barrie. "Obviously our purpose in life is to promote the collecting of art in museums and galleries, so we were quite keen to put a bit of an emphasis on that," he says.
"But it is a broadening of the criteria rather than a narrowing. We want this to be a prize that recognises outstanding achievement in museums and galleries."
Although the Art Fund has only initially committed to two years of sponsorship, its prize has certainly raised the bar for museum awards since it started in 2003. So is there room for any new prizes?
Nick Dodd from Sheffield thinks that there should be more large PR-focused awards. "There is space for a few really big awards - the industry could tolerate about three," he says. "That would allow you to award a prize to an art gallery and a museum as they are both quite distinct."
The recognition and motivation brought by prizes of all sizes to institutions can invigorate the whole industry. They attract people to museums and galleries and drive up standards, which in turn brings more people in.
It is a virtuous, if fragile, circle, almost wholly dependent on one or two well-known awards to maintain the national and international profile of UK museums and galleries outside of the big London institutions.
Aaron Davies is a freelance journalist
A year's worth of winners
The Gulbenkian (now Art Fund prize)
Pallant House Gallery, West Sussex
"Winning the Gulbenkian prize for museums and galleries in 2007 generated enormous interest and the feedback we received after winning the award has been tremendous, both in terms of publicity and visitor numbers."
Stefan van Raay, director, Pallant House Gallery
The Guardian Family-Friendly Museum award
Falmouth Art Gallery, Cornwall
"We were very pleased to win the award because it is the audience who vote for it, which means it's not an elitist award in any way. We were also very happy with the publicity and national recognition that it brought."
Alex Hooper, assistant curator, Falmouth Art Gallery
Best Industrial or Technological Museum 2007 at the European Museum of the Year
ss Great Britain, Bristol
"We haven't made as much of it as I would have liked, but it was good to get European acknowledgement as well as UK acknowledgement."
Matthew Tanner, director, ss Great Britain
The Conservation awards 2007
Susan Payne from the Perth Museum and Art Gallery and Tuula Pardoe from the Scottish Conservation Studio won the award for conservation
Jodi award for Excellence in Accessible Technology
Wolverhampton Arts and Museums Service
"We were bowled over. The award is a wonderful recognition."
Linda Ellis, ICT development officer, Wolverhampton Arts and Museums Service
The Art Newspaper and Axa Art Catalogue prize
The Wallace Collection, London
"The award has brought excellent publicity for the collection and has been a great boost for morale. The catalogue involved staff in all sorts of ways, allowing people to use their talents - the first ever translation of Xanto's sonnets into English in the catalogue was done by one of our library staff."
Jeremy Warren, assistant director and head of collections, the Wallace Collection
Sandford Awards for Heritage Education
Ironbridge Gorge Museums, Shropshire; Geffrye Museum, London
Art Fund prize 2008 longlist
1. Helmand: The Soldiers' Story National Army Museum, London
2. Sacred, British Library, London
3. Topsham Museum, Devon
4. International Slavery Museum, National Museums Liverpool
5. Shetland Museum and Archives, Lerwick
6. Orkney Museum
7. London Transport Museum
8. The Lightbox, Woking
9. Breaking the Chains, British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, Bristol
10. Wellcome Collection, London
1. Helmand: The Soldiers' Story National Army Museum, London
2. Sacred, British Library, London
3. Topsham Museum, Devon
4. International Slavery Museum, National Museums Liverpool
5. Shetland Museum and Archives, Lerwick
6. Orkney Museum
7. London Transport Museum
8. The Lightbox, Woking
9. Breaking the Chains, British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, Bristol
10. Wellcome Collection, London
