I’ve been talking to leading museum people about their priorities and plans. Here, I look at how museums and galleries are rethinking their purpose and their priorities. Next month, I’ll examine how they are changing the ways they work.
With less funding and, in England at least, less political pressure to widen audiences, I wondered if I’d find museums battered, neglected and inward-looking. Far from it: museum directors seem to be as ambitious as ever, with a clearer sense of focus.
Carole Souter, chief executive of the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), says she has found the continued ambition to do new things very surprising: “I had assumed there’d be a pause, at the very least, but applications to us for really new, exciting, innovative projects are coming through at a faster rate than I’ve seen in my eight-and-a-half years at HLF.
"People are absolutely determined to keep going for it. They have the self-confidence as they know there is a [public] appetite for them to do good things.”
In part, museums are doing “good things” to keep funders on board. “You must carry on, be positive and have energy and plans or people will lose confidence in you,” says Janet Barnes, the chief executive of York Museums Trust.
“To keep faith with our main funders, we have to align ourselves with the ambitions of the council and be embedded in the city. We have to keep relevant.”
But there’s much more to it than chasing funding. There’s a hunger to have a greater impact. I found people want to make their museums genuinely useful to the local community and meaningful to individuals.
Barnes thinks it’s “wonderful” and “fantastic” when museums do something to improve an individual’s life. The goal is that you’ve been useful to somebody, she says.
At the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Sue Hayward, heritage manager at Bournemouth Borough Council, says although the museum’s work with disadvantaged people may only reach small numbers, it’s those small numbers of people that tend to cause difficulties for society.
The impact has been significant when, for example, a boy excluded from school says that a museum-led project is “the best thing that has happened to me in my life”.
Hayward says the museum is becoming better connected to local organisations and with them it is “helping Bournemouth reposition itself as a more cultural town”.
York Museums Trust wants to have a greater cultural impact, too: “We’ve moved from being a museum and gallery service into being much more of a cultural provider. Our events will be a very important part of the cultural life of the city,” says Barnes.
Tony Butler, director of the Museum of East Anglian Life in Stowmarket, also aims to enhance culture in the local area. “It’s not just about our big buildings and big collections,” Butler says. “If others are better at harbouring the cultural traditions of the area, the museum’s role should be to support them.”
So, rather than trying to attract people to its own May Day celebration, the museum could instead take part in a well-established May Day event in a nearby village. It might get fewer visitors on May Day itself, but it would be playing a bigger part in local culture. Several museums I spoke to want to develop such reciprocal relationships.
Butler sees the museum less as a “knowledge organisation” and more as a “connector”, putting people and organisations in touch with each other. He has ambitions for it to take on an “activist” role.
“We want to find out what issues really matter to people – housing, transport – and use the collections to support programming and events around those themes,” Butler says. “The museum would respond and be a provocateur in addressing contemporary rural problems.”
Butler has developed the Happy Museum project over the past few years, so more museums could see how they can make a difference to local communities. Godalming Museum successfully bid for Happy Museum funding to work with local environmental activist groups.
“The more we do with community groups the better and more lively the museum is,” says Godalming Museum curator Alison Pattison. She thinks things work best of all when a group approaches the museum with its own idea. (I’ll look a co-production more next month.)
Pattison says a community museum has a clarity about what it is trying to achieve, connecting local people and making their heritage meaningful. There are benefits from being in an area with few tourists.
“You don’t need to extrapolate from the local to the general, you can just deal with the particular,” says Pattison.
At the HLF, Souter believes it’s not only local museums that must engage communities.
“It’s perhaps more challenging for a national museum to work out how best every part of its organisation can have real impact on community engagement and development because it’s got so many communities to serve: tourists, serious scholars, the very local community… It must be endlessly exciting to think about serving all those communities.”
National Museums Scotland (NMS) does “different things for different audiences”, says its director Gordon Rintoul. “It’s not just saying: ‘This is what we’re going to produce; here you are; that’s it for five years.’
It’s about an ongoing engagement because the views of audiences change. You need to make the relationship a live one.”
Rintoul thinks “access” sounds too inactive. I found that people working in museums increasingly prefer the word engagement.
Learning may be in decline as a term, too, perhaps because schools work is ticking along but is not the priority it once was. (One director talked of schools work being a “gravy train”, but one that doesn’t cover all its costs.)
Another word declining in popularity is diversity, which is losing ground to community. Diversity and learning are not declining in importance, but they are being set within the broader arena of community engagement.
(Interestingly Arts Council England’s – ACE – recent statements about museums talk extensively of access, learning and diversity, so the fall from favour of these words may be shortlived.)
In a nice, business-like, use of language, Rintoul says the NMS chairman talks about “leveraging the collections”. That is, “using collections in a much more active way physically and digitally”.
“We need to liberate the richness we have in our collection,” says Barnes at York Museums Trust. “We need to invest in curatorship and research to have new rich stories that we can engage audiences with. It’s boring and glib unless you’ve got new stuff to tell.
“It’s curatorial expertise and research with public outcomes,” Barnes adds. “We’re very conscious of the public outcomes of all our work.”
Consultant Gaby Porter agrees: “It has to be about engagement of people with collections, not collections themselves.”
As a Museums Association board member, Porter helped to construct the argument to the arts council that excellence does not lie intrinsically in collections, but in the ways in which museums stimulate people’s engagement with collections.
“ACE seem to have largely accepted the argument, but I have a lingering worry that, in assessing funding applications, ACE might still take a rather supplier-led view of museums and end up valuing collections and scholarship for their own sake, rather than for their public impact,” Porter says.
Excellence is a word museums will need to get used to. And excellence certainly isn’t about great buildings alone.
“Capital investment is now being thought of as improving engagement rather than the basics,” according to Souter at the HLF. “You can’t be a great place to visit unless you are engaged with your local community.”
Butler at the Museum of East Anglian Life sees museum buildings as valuable community spaces: modern-day village greens or city squares.
Like collections, museum buildings exist to be used and useful – otherwise they will become the content-free white elephants people feared in the early days of the lottery. In all sorts of museums, there’s growing interest in creative programming rather than simply operating buildings.
For Butler, success is about being interesting to people. “I’d rather do interesting things than blockbusters that get queues out of the door,” he says.
Sally MacDonald, director of museums and collections at University College London, says what matters is “depth of engagement, not numbers”.
She adds: “We’re not very good at capturing and conveying what people get out of projects or sessions. We need better ways of recording depth of engagement so that we aren’t always talking about attendance numbers.”
MacDonald is passionate about “interesting and experimental work to get quality of engagement”. But she says this doesn’t have to be done in a building open to the public.
She hopes new technologies will make it possible to tag objects so they can be lent securely by museums to all sorts of people to be used in different ways and places.
Online, on site or out in the community, museums are increasingly being judged not by their buildings, their collections or their expertise, but by the impact that they have – how useful they are to individuals, to places and to communities.
Museums have had over a decade of growth in terms of buildings, audiences and budgets. But is growth still good?
“Growth in terms of buildings will be thought about much harder in future. I think people will be looking more at how to use what they’ve got more selectively”
Carole Souter, chief executive, Heritage Lottery Fund
“Museums ought to be looking at how new developments are going to be financially sustainable”
Gordon Rintoul, director, National Museums Scotland
“The days of assumed growth are definitely over”
Gaby Porter, consultant
“There’s a limit of volume – but I don’t think we’re there yet”
Janet Barnes, chief executive, York Museums Trust
Museums used to talk of “permanent” collections and “permanent” displays. Are those days over as we learn that sustainability means adaptability, not resisting change?
With collections under review, disposal commonplace and an acceptance that things decay (however good your preventive conservation), collections don’t seem quite so permanent any more. But what about permanent displays?
“We won’t have displays that last for 20 years”
Janet Barnes, chief executive, York Museums Trust
“You have to reinvent yourself fairly regularly. You have to do it quite cheaply and the main barrier is in our heads”
Sally MacDonald, director of museums and collections, University College London
“People could contribute as they go round; shape the museum so it reflects their heritage”
Alison Pattison, curator, Godalming Museum
With less funding and, in England at least, less political pressure to widen audiences, I wondered if I’d find museums battered, neglected and inward-looking. Far from it: museum directors seem to be as ambitious as ever, with a clearer sense of focus.
Carole Souter, chief executive of the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), says she has found the continued ambition to do new things very surprising: “I had assumed there’d be a pause, at the very least, but applications to us for really new, exciting, innovative projects are coming through at a faster rate than I’ve seen in my eight-and-a-half years at HLF.
"People are absolutely determined to keep going for it. They have the self-confidence as they know there is a [public] appetite for them to do good things.”
In part, museums are doing “good things” to keep funders on board. “You must carry on, be positive and have energy and plans or people will lose confidence in you,” says Janet Barnes, the chief executive of York Museums Trust.
“To keep faith with our main funders, we have to align ourselves with the ambitions of the council and be embedded in the city. We have to keep relevant.”
But there’s much more to it than chasing funding. There’s a hunger to have a greater impact. I found people want to make their museums genuinely useful to the local community and meaningful to individuals.
Barnes thinks it’s “wonderful” and “fantastic” when museums do something to improve an individual’s life. The goal is that you’ve been useful to somebody, she says.
At the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Sue Hayward, heritage manager at Bournemouth Borough Council, says although the museum’s work with disadvantaged people may only reach small numbers, it’s those small numbers of people that tend to cause difficulties for society.
The impact has been significant when, for example, a boy excluded from school says that a museum-led project is “the best thing that has happened to me in my life”.
Hayward says the museum is becoming better connected to local organisations and with them it is “helping Bournemouth reposition itself as a more cultural town”.
York Museums Trust wants to have a greater cultural impact, too: “We’ve moved from being a museum and gallery service into being much more of a cultural provider. Our events will be a very important part of the cultural life of the city,” says Barnes.
Tony Butler, director of the Museum of East Anglian Life in Stowmarket, also aims to enhance culture in the local area. “It’s not just about our big buildings and big collections,” Butler says. “If others are better at harbouring the cultural traditions of the area, the museum’s role should be to support them.”
So, rather than trying to attract people to its own May Day celebration, the museum could instead take part in a well-established May Day event in a nearby village. It might get fewer visitors on May Day itself, but it would be playing a bigger part in local culture. Several museums I spoke to want to develop such reciprocal relationships.
Butler sees the museum less as a “knowledge organisation” and more as a “connector”, putting people and organisations in touch with each other. He has ambitions for it to take on an “activist” role.
“We want to find out what issues really matter to people – housing, transport – and use the collections to support programming and events around those themes,” Butler says. “The museum would respond and be a provocateur in addressing contemporary rural problems.”
Butler has developed the Happy Museum project over the past few years, so more museums could see how they can make a difference to local communities. Godalming Museum successfully bid for Happy Museum funding to work with local environmental activist groups.
“The more we do with community groups the better and more lively the museum is,” says Godalming Museum curator Alison Pattison. She thinks things work best of all when a group approaches the museum with its own idea. (I’ll look a co-production more next month.)
Pattison says a community museum has a clarity about what it is trying to achieve, connecting local people and making their heritage meaningful. There are benefits from being in an area with few tourists.
“You don’t need to extrapolate from the local to the general, you can just deal with the particular,” says Pattison.
At the HLF, Souter believes it’s not only local museums that must engage communities.
“It’s perhaps more challenging for a national museum to work out how best every part of its organisation can have real impact on community engagement and development because it’s got so many communities to serve: tourists, serious scholars, the very local community… It must be endlessly exciting to think about serving all those communities.”
National Museums Scotland (NMS) does “different things for different audiences”, says its director Gordon Rintoul. “It’s not just saying: ‘This is what we’re going to produce; here you are; that’s it for five years.’
It’s about an ongoing engagement because the views of audiences change. You need to make the relationship a live one.”
Rintoul thinks “access” sounds too inactive. I found that people working in museums increasingly prefer the word engagement.
Learning may be in decline as a term, too, perhaps because schools work is ticking along but is not the priority it once was. (One director talked of schools work being a “gravy train”, but one that doesn’t cover all its costs.)
Another word declining in popularity is diversity, which is losing ground to community. Diversity and learning are not declining in importance, but they are being set within the broader arena of community engagement.
(Interestingly Arts Council England’s – ACE – recent statements about museums talk extensively of access, learning and diversity, so the fall from favour of these words may be shortlived.)
In a nice, business-like, use of language, Rintoul says the NMS chairman talks about “leveraging the collections”. That is, “using collections in a much more active way physically and digitally”.
“We need to liberate the richness we have in our collection,” says Barnes at York Museums Trust. “We need to invest in curatorship and research to have new rich stories that we can engage audiences with. It’s boring and glib unless you’ve got new stuff to tell.
“It’s curatorial expertise and research with public outcomes,” Barnes adds. “We’re very conscious of the public outcomes of all our work.”
Consultant Gaby Porter agrees: “It has to be about engagement of people with collections, not collections themselves.”
As a Museums Association board member, Porter helped to construct the argument to the arts council that excellence does not lie intrinsically in collections, but in the ways in which museums stimulate people’s engagement with collections.
“ACE seem to have largely accepted the argument, but I have a lingering worry that, in assessing funding applications, ACE might still take a rather supplier-led view of museums and end up valuing collections and scholarship for their own sake, rather than for their public impact,” Porter says.
Excellence is a word museums will need to get used to. And excellence certainly isn’t about great buildings alone.
“Capital investment is now being thought of as improving engagement rather than the basics,” according to Souter at the HLF. “You can’t be a great place to visit unless you are engaged with your local community.”
Butler at the Museum of East Anglian Life sees museum buildings as valuable community spaces: modern-day village greens or city squares.
Like collections, museum buildings exist to be used and useful – otherwise they will become the content-free white elephants people feared in the early days of the lottery. In all sorts of museums, there’s growing interest in creative programming rather than simply operating buildings.
For Butler, success is about being interesting to people. “I’d rather do interesting things than blockbusters that get queues out of the door,” he says.
Sally MacDonald, director of museums and collections at University College London, says what matters is “depth of engagement, not numbers”.
She adds: “We’re not very good at capturing and conveying what people get out of projects or sessions. We need better ways of recording depth of engagement so that we aren’t always talking about attendance numbers.”
MacDonald is passionate about “interesting and experimental work to get quality of engagement”. But she says this doesn’t have to be done in a building open to the public.
She hopes new technologies will make it possible to tag objects so they can be lent securely by museums to all sorts of people to be used in different ways and places.
Online, on site or out in the community, museums are increasingly being judged not by their buildings, their collections or their expertise, but by the impact that they have – how useful they are to individuals, to places and to communities.
The end of growth?
Museums have had over a decade of growth in terms of buildings, audiences and budgets. But is growth still good?
“Growth in terms of buildings will be thought about much harder in future. I think people will be looking more at how to use what they’ve got more selectively”
Carole Souter, chief executive, Heritage Lottery Fund
“Museums ought to be looking at how new developments are going to be financially sustainable”
Gordon Rintoul, director, National Museums Scotland
“The days of assumed growth are definitely over”
Gaby Porter, consultant
“There’s a limit of volume – but I don’t think we’re there yet”
Janet Barnes, chief executive, York Museums Trust
The end of permanence?
Museums used to talk of “permanent” collections and “permanent” displays. Are those days over as we learn that sustainability means adaptability, not resisting change?
With collections under review, disposal commonplace and an acceptance that things decay (however good your preventive conservation), collections don’t seem quite so permanent any more. But what about permanent displays?
“We won’t have displays that last for 20 years”
Janet Barnes, chief executive, York Museums Trust
“You have to reinvent yourself fairly regularly. You have to do it quite cheaply and the main barrier is in our heads”
Sally MacDonald, director of museums and collections, University College London
“People could contribute as they go round; shape the museum so it reflects their heritage”
Alison Pattison, curator, Godalming Museum
