Which is more "knowledgeable": the museum that realises it has gaps in its catalogue, or the one that thinks it knows everything about its collection?
Is either contributing more to the sum of knowledge than the institution with a full inventory of everything it owns whose only concession to access is to open its stores to Phd students and rotate its public displays once a decade?
Alongside these big questions about the future of collections-related knowledge lie more prosaic dilemmas, such as how information should be extracted from collections, who should gather it, and what should be done with this knowledge once it is acquired?
For the past three years, the Museums Association (MA) and others have wrestled with how best to improve the handling of collections knowledge. In its 2005 report, Collections for the Future, and the 2007 follow-up, Making Collections Effective, the MA highlighted several concerns.
Chief among these was the inadequate public access many museums were offering to their collections. Other problems included inconsistent or incomplete cataloguing, and the lack of time available to staff to update, and if necessary revise, records.
Perhaps most alarming was the revelation that much of the knowledge that is accumulated by curators is "lost" when they retire or move jobs.
Hedley Swain, head of museum policy for the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), says people who work in museums are good at curating objects but not at curating knowledge.
"It's like bad insulation: all this knowledge is seeping out of the cracks. A huge amount of research is done for temporary exhibitions, but it often ends up in a skip. At the most basic level, curators could attach any white labels they've typed out to the electronic record of related objects in their collections."
In the past year, the MA has launched various initiatives to address these issues. Last October, buoyed by a £150,000 grant from the Monument Trust, it awarded seven fellowships to recently retired, or soon-to-retire, curators to pay for 50 to 100 days of their time so they could convey knowledge to their successors. Applications for a second round of fellowships closed in May.
Other schemes have also emerged from the MA's Effective Collections programme, bolstered by a £1m grant from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, including a pilot loans brokering service which will link together regional mu-seums (and ultimately nationals) so they can share and swap material.
Its aims are twofold: to give museums easier access to items from other collections that will enrich their displays, and liberate objects that might otherwise languish in the vaults of their owner-institutions for want of any space or reason to display them. In doing so, it should provide public access to material that hasn't seen the light of day for decades.
Meanwhile, the 40-plus subject-specialist networks set up to foster links between expert curators based in different areas are working to pool and exchange collections knowledge.
Some institutions have also taken unilateral action to improve knowledge retention. This summer, Kingston University researchers begin work on a three-year oral history project, Museum Lives, designed to capture the knowledge of 50 senior curators and ex-curators at the Natural History Museum (NHM).
In addition to those who have already left, 24 will retire in the next five years - taking with them 775 years of curating experience.
But are schemes like these enough to arrest the "seepage" of collections knowledge from Britain's museums? Swain, says maximising knowledge potential can only be achieved by a wholesale culture shift:
"In organisations like BP everyone 'hot-desks' - information won't be in folders only one person can access, but is shared company-wide. Yet individual curators still have their own files containing knowledge accessible to no one else. Anyone in the museum - theoretically in the world - should be able to access it via a shared drive."
Digitising collections and providing virtual access to objects for public and professionals alike also has a role to play. Nick Poole, chief executive of the Collections Trust (formerly MDA), believes this needs to be done alongside cataloguing: "The most important thing is to make a basic inventory for your own records, but when you're capturing knowledge you can digitise too, and vice versa."
He adds: "Most knowledge is in the system somewhere - it's just 'localised'. If you acquire new knowledge curating an exhibition, you should attach a catalogue number to it, as you would an object."
Cataloguing remains a sensitive subject for large and small institutions alike. Many smaller museums have piecemeal records at best. Some have only the basic 'transfers of title' acquired with donated objects - often yellowing slips of paper bearing the scantest descriptions.
Larger bequests may be accompanied by fuller inventories, but as these are usually the work of amateur enthusiasts they invariably contain much that is guesswork.
At the other end of the spectrum, the biggest museums house collections so sprawling it's impossible for them to catalogue every object - never mind return to re-examine them at a later date in light of new knowledge.
Despite these obstacles, the NHM (which boasts 70 million items) provides a lesson in how imaginative solutions can help the most overloaded museums keep abreast of their back-catalogues.
Max Barclay, an entomology curator in charge of its 8 million-strong beetle collection, sends 100,000 samples a year on research loans to entomologists around the globe. Providing "access" in this way - albeit exclusively to scientists - has led to the identification of previously unknown species, and some reclassifications.
"There are 400,000 known species of beetle worldwide, and 1,000 are identified each year," explains Barclay. "Of these, 100-200 come from us."
Regional museums are starting to benefit from the input of independent subject specialists, too, thanks to Effective Collections.
On reopening after a £1.2m refit this coming September, Plymouth Museum will dust off Chinese costumes held in storage for years, on the advice of experts.
And British Museum Egyptologists recently identified unexpectedly significant vases from a Sir John Garstang excavation at Scottish Borders' Hawick Museum. It is now liaising with other regional museums and galleries to develop a joint touring exhibition of the archaeologist's finds.
Sally Cross, the MA's collections coordinator, is responsible for promoting these collaborations, and recruiting the new inter-museum loans brokers. In due course, she aims to appoint two to each region, but for now the MA will launch its own online loans brokerage this summer: "Another idea is to hold networking lunches where curators from different areas can meet and debate."
But it's not just the experts that can boost knowledge, the public can help too. There are well-documented cases of curators learning about the significance of ethnographic artefacts from visitors from indigenous societies. And Birmingham's Thinktank science museum is exploring a different model of public participation.
Its new exhibition, Changing Times, is curated by people from the city. The 10 individuals chose objects they wished to exhibit from a pool of 500 selected by staff. According to the museum, these "guest curators" gained far deeper access to collections than that routinely offered to visitors, and came away with richer knowledge.
Suzanne Keene, head of University College London's Museum Studies MA, whose latest research project, Collections for People, is published this month, believes delivering this level of access is what collections-related knowledge is all about:
"Subsidised museums are sitting on huge amounts of information, and should be making it available - not just saying, 'you can see it when we say you can'. Otherwise they're getting all this public money, but what for?"
James Morrison is a freelance journalist
Is either contributing more to the sum of knowledge than the institution with a full inventory of everything it owns whose only concession to access is to open its stores to Phd students and rotate its public displays once a decade?
Alongside these big questions about the future of collections-related knowledge lie more prosaic dilemmas, such as how information should be extracted from collections, who should gather it, and what should be done with this knowledge once it is acquired?
For the past three years, the Museums Association (MA) and others have wrestled with how best to improve the handling of collections knowledge. In its 2005 report, Collections for the Future, and the 2007 follow-up, Making Collections Effective, the MA highlighted several concerns.
Chief among these was the inadequate public access many museums were offering to their collections. Other problems included inconsistent or incomplete cataloguing, and the lack of time available to staff to update, and if necessary revise, records.
Perhaps most alarming was the revelation that much of the knowledge that is accumulated by curators is "lost" when they retire or move jobs.
Hedley Swain, head of museum policy for the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), says people who work in museums are good at curating objects but not at curating knowledge.
"It's like bad insulation: all this knowledge is seeping out of the cracks. A huge amount of research is done for temporary exhibitions, but it often ends up in a skip. At the most basic level, curators could attach any white labels they've typed out to the electronic record of related objects in their collections."
In the past year, the MA has launched various initiatives to address these issues. Last October, buoyed by a £150,000 grant from the Monument Trust, it awarded seven fellowships to recently retired, or soon-to-retire, curators to pay for 50 to 100 days of their time so they could convey knowledge to their successors. Applications for a second round of fellowships closed in May.
Other schemes have also emerged from the MA's Effective Collections programme, bolstered by a £1m grant from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, including a pilot loans brokering service which will link together regional mu-seums (and ultimately nationals) so they can share and swap material.
Its aims are twofold: to give museums easier access to items from other collections that will enrich their displays, and liberate objects that might otherwise languish in the vaults of their owner-institutions for want of any space or reason to display them. In doing so, it should provide public access to material that hasn't seen the light of day for decades.
Meanwhile, the 40-plus subject-specialist networks set up to foster links between expert curators based in different areas are working to pool and exchange collections knowledge.
Some institutions have also taken unilateral action to improve knowledge retention. This summer, Kingston University researchers begin work on a three-year oral history project, Museum Lives, designed to capture the knowledge of 50 senior curators and ex-curators at the Natural History Museum (NHM).
In addition to those who have already left, 24 will retire in the next five years - taking with them 775 years of curating experience.
But are schemes like these enough to arrest the "seepage" of collections knowledge from Britain's museums? Swain, says maximising knowledge potential can only be achieved by a wholesale culture shift:
"In organisations like BP everyone 'hot-desks' - information won't be in folders only one person can access, but is shared company-wide. Yet individual curators still have their own files containing knowledge accessible to no one else. Anyone in the museum - theoretically in the world - should be able to access it via a shared drive."
Digitising collections and providing virtual access to objects for public and professionals alike also has a role to play. Nick Poole, chief executive of the Collections Trust (formerly MDA), believes this needs to be done alongside cataloguing: "The most important thing is to make a basic inventory for your own records, but when you're capturing knowledge you can digitise too, and vice versa."
He adds: "Most knowledge is in the system somewhere - it's just 'localised'. If you acquire new knowledge curating an exhibition, you should attach a catalogue number to it, as you would an object."
Cataloguing remains a sensitive subject for large and small institutions alike. Many smaller museums have piecemeal records at best. Some have only the basic 'transfers of title' acquired with donated objects - often yellowing slips of paper bearing the scantest descriptions.
Larger bequests may be accompanied by fuller inventories, but as these are usually the work of amateur enthusiasts they invariably contain much that is guesswork.
At the other end of the spectrum, the biggest museums house collections so sprawling it's impossible for them to catalogue every object - never mind return to re-examine them at a later date in light of new knowledge.
Despite these obstacles, the NHM (which boasts 70 million items) provides a lesson in how imaginative solutions can help the most overloaded museums keep abreast of their back-catalogues.
Max Barclay, an entomology curator in charge of its 8 million-strong beetle collection, sends 100,000 samples a year on research loans to entomologists around the globe. Providing "access" in this way - albeit exclusively to scientists - has led to the identification of previously unknown species, and some reclassifications.
"There are 400,000 known species of beetle worldwide, and 1,000 are identified each year," explains Barclay. "Of these, 100-200 come from us."
Regional museums are starting to benefit from the input of independent subject specialists, too, thanks to Effective Collections.
On reopening after a £1.2m refit this coming September, Plymouth Museum will dust off Chinese costumes held in storage for years, on the advice of experts.
And British Museum Egyptologists recently identified unexpectedly significant vases from a Sir John Garstang excavation at Scottish Borders' Hawick Museum. It is now liaising with other regional museums and galleries to develop a joint touring exhibition of the archaeologist's finds.
Sally Cross, the MA's collections coordinator, is responsible for promoting these collaborations, and recruiting the new inter-museum loans brokers. In due course, she aims to appoint two to each region, but for now the MA will launch its own online loans brokerage this summer: "Another idea is to hold networking lunches where curators from different areas can meet and debate."
But it's not just the experts that can boost knowledge, the public can help too. There are well-documented cases of curators learning about the significance of ethnographic artefacts from visitors from indigenous societies. And Birmingham's Thinktank science museum is exploring a different model of public participation.
Its new exhibition, Changing Times, is curated by people from the city. The 10 individuals chose objects they wished to exhibit from a pool of 500 selected by staff. According to the museum, these "guest curators" gained far deeper access to collections than that routinely offered to visitors, and came away with richer knowledge.
Suzanne Keene, head of University College London's Museum Studies MA, whose latest research project, Collections for People, is published this month, believes delivering this level of access is what collections-related knowledge is all about:
"Subsidised museums are sitting on huge amounts of information, and should be making it available - not just saying, 'you can see it when we say you can'. Otherwise they're getting all this public money, but what for?"
James Morrison is a freelance journalist
Les Jessop
Les Jessop, 54, is using his 50-day Monument Trust Fellowship to return to Tyne and Wear Museums to educate younger staff in little-known curatorial practices of their forebears:
"When the museum service was formed in the 1970s, it had the resources to expand its natural history collection, but since funding priorities have changed the memory of how things used to be done has faded.
"For example, to make storage of stuffed animals easier, some were turned into 'study skins' - flattened out with their heads pointing forwards. As well as updating our collections handbook, I'm running workshops demonstrating practices like these."
Phil Atkins
Phil Atkins, 62, retired from York's National Railway Museum in 2006, after a 25-year stint as librarian. His year-long fellowship will focus on adding detail to the museum's catalogue, and updating its encyclopaedic users' guide to Britain's railway collections - placing it online for the first time:
"The age of research-based curating is gone, so much of my job involved answering phones and dealing with email queries," says Atkins. "At last I'm doing what I should have done 20 years ago! The internet has revolutionised things - I can check details online as I work in a way I couldn't have done back then."
Len Pole
Len Pole, 64, is using his fellowship to help a museum he ran earlier in his career improve interpretation of its ethnographic collection:
"I retired from Exeter Museum in 2005, but before then I ran Saffron Walden Museum for 22 years," Pole says.
"As it's much smaller, with fewer staff, I opted to return there. I want to tease out connections between ethnographic material from the Pacific, South America and North Africa, and relate them to Saffron Walden through the local collectors who donated them. I'm using knowledge I acquired after leaving there to improve its catalogue entries, and holding staff master-classes."
Elaine Kennedy
Recently retired Elaine Kennedy, 55, is returning to Dumfries and Galloway Museums Service, where she worked for 30 years, to enhance the collections databases of Dumfries Museum, Robert Burns' House, the Robert Burns Centre, and Sanquhar Tolbooth Museum:
"The staff and I drew up a list of collection topics: JM Barrie, a resident of Dumfries; Sanquhar knitting, a Scottish textile tradition; the role played by the regions in the war effort; and the photographic archive of German ethnographer Werner Kissling. Apart from person to person communication with staff, this knowledge is (being) gathered and shared electronically."
Les Jessop, 54, is using his 50-day Monument Trust Fellowship to return to Tyne and Wear Museums to educate younger staff in little-known curatorial practices of their forebears:
"When the museum service was formed in the 1970s, it had the resources to expand its natural history collection, but since funding priorities have changed the memory of how things used to be done has faded.
"For example, to make storage of stuffed animals easier, some were turned into 'study skins' - flattened out with their heads pointing forwards. As well as updating our collections handbook, I'm running workshops demonstrating practices like these."
Phil Atkins
Phil Atkins, 62, retired from York's National Railway Museum in 2006, after a 25-year stint as librarian. His year-long fellowship will focus on adding detail to the museum's catalogue, and updating its encyclopaedic users' guide to Britain's railway collections - placing it online for the first time:
"The age of research-based curating is gone, so much of my job involved answering phones and dealing with email queries," says Atkins. "At last I'm doing what I should have done 20 years ago! The internet has revolutionised things - I can check details online as I work in a way I couldn't have done back then."
Len Pole
Len Pole, 64, is using his fellowship to help a museum he ran earlier in his career improve interpretation of its ethnographic collection:
"I retired from Exeter Museum in 2005, but before then I ran Saffron Walden Museum for 22 years," Pole says.
"As it's much smaller, with fewer staff, I opted to return there. I want to tease out connections between ethnographic material from the Pacific, South America and North Africa, and relate them to Saffron Walden through the local collectors who donated them. I'm using knowledge I acquired after leaving there to improve its catalogue entries, and holding staff master-classes."
Elaine Kennedy
Recently retired Elaine Kennedy, 55, is returning to Dumfries and Galloway Museums Service, where she worked for 30 years, to enhance the collections databases of Dumfries Museum, Robert Burns' House, the Robert Burns Centre, and Sanquhar Tolbooth Museum:
"The staff and I drew up a list of collection topics: JM Barrie, a resident of Dumfries; Sanquhar knitting, a Scottish textile tradition; the role played by the regions in the war effort; and the photographic archive of German ethnographer Werner Kissling. Apart from person to person communication with staff, this knowledge is (being) gathered and shared electronically."
