MLA 1: failing to deliver real services
Mark Taylor, the director of the Museums Association, is half-right about the problems created by the arranged partnership between museums, libraries and archives (see link 1 below).
But I think it has more to do with the failure of the Museums, Archives and Libraries Council (MLA) to deliver real services, and the collapse in stakeholder involvement at regional level, which will lead to its self-induced abolition. This is another structural change that the museum community will have no real say in. The sad thing is I feel we do need a strong national agency that will fight the non-national museum sector's corner.
Taylor is right that the MLA does not create an intuitive partnership between sectors that have less in common than first meets the eye. But I feel that the MLA's underperformance warrants greater concern than its structural make up, in particular the demise of a regional structure that had grassroots support.
The gradual development of the area museum councils (AMCs), and their successor bodies since the 1960s was destroyed without any foresight by its masters at Queen's Gate. The closest thing to a museum strategy in the last 10 years, Renaissance in the Regions, clearly mapped out a role for AMCs.
The cause of the MLA's decline, at least in the regions, is its failure to be relevant and accountable to its stakeholders. Abandoning or reducing services like a grants schemes, professional advice, career development and training, yet at the same time claiming that a strategic body does not become involved in practical support, is a surefire way of becoming redundant.
All the AMCs were able to attract real local buy-in through their subscriptions from local authorities and independents and include their constituency in their governance, something that the MLA felt was unimportant or was unaware of. A damning indictment, as local government funding for the museum sector is at crisis point, something that should be a priority for the MLA.
The uneasy discussions about accreditation suggest that the last remnants of useful services to the sector are going to be largely pushed onto the hub museums and/or the Collections Trust. Why then have the MLA at all?
Stephen Lowy, AMA
MLA 2: missed chance
Mark Taylor questions what has been achieved since 1999 in bringing museums, libraries and archives together. As he observes, the answer is very little.
We should be asking senior figures in the three domains, and MLA in particular, about the dearth of investment and leadership in this area. Is slow progress due to lack of vision? Are we too busy to look beyond our narrow horizons? Do people feel threatened? Is it just too difficult?
Taylor contends that the domains don't have a lot in common. For some museums, libraries and archives, that may be true. Library services dominated by modern books have a limited amount in common with museums and archives. But many libraries have special collections of older books, held in perpetuity, just like archives and museums.
Museums often have archives and even libraries. Many archives hold artefacts. Collection managers share concerns about custodial care, security, environment, conservation and mediated access. Libraries and archives have both learnt from museums about popular exhibitions. Museums have much to learn from libraries and archives about cataloguing, hubs and shared databases.
For an older collection like ours at Aberdeen University, many of our holdings were acquired in mixed collections of books, manuscripts and artefacts, subsequently separated and eventually ending up in our library, archives or various museums.
Material that once was closely coherent became highly dispersed and now difficult to trace. Our challenge is to facilitate this reassembly, intellectually, if not physically. Many organisations share similar aims, and wish to see this thinking extended to higher levels.
When one of our users asks what we know about a particular person, place or subject, they don't care who has the information, and it's up to us to make it easy for them to find it. There are also efficiencies to be made in shared conservation, exhibition or education teams, or at least shared expertise. That we have not achieved more through convergence is a disservice to our users.
Alan Knox, head of historic collections, University of Aberdeen
MLA 3: shared aims
As an independent historian who works for a museum, has worked in the past as a librarian and an archivist, and who regularly consults collections held in all three sectors, I must take issue with Mark Taylor's attack on a joined-up approach to our sector.
If we are so different, how come we share collections? Which service holds the local newspaper collections in your area? I bet it's different to the neighbouring area. I can guarantee all three will hold ephemera, and almost certainly all three will hold documents.
Of course, all three sectors have common purpose and common concerns. Worried that historians don't care about material culture?
Then put museum collections information onto the local archives service database, where the historians will be looking, and house them in the same building. Better still, put your local history and reference library collections on the same database.
Concerned about your footfall? Put some of the library's public access computers in the museum, provide museum displays in the library, and make archives accessible in both. The placing of archives reading rooms into libraries may be the result of cost-cutting, but it's a boon for researchers to have reference collections available in the same room as the documents.
Taylor lists a number of differences between museums, libraries and archives, which are either non-existent or trivial. So what if libraries don't use (many) volunteers? So what if there are more independent charitable trusts in the museum sector? And besides, many archives are independent, and quite a lot are charitable trusts.
Taylor says: "many marketing concerns of museums have little or no resonance in libraries and archives" but my three favourite libraries all have a cafe and a shop - and incidentally, all three house the local archives, and two have museum display space.
Taylor is clearly more interested in being the king of a small state than the prince of one part of a federal state. I wouldn't mind that, if it wasn't so damaging for the public who we are meant to care so passionately about.
Mark Nixon, Bonnybridge, Stirlingshire
Unfair review
I was disappointed to read the bizarre review by Julian Spalding of our new gallery, Scotland: A Changing Nation, which covers the entire top floor of the National Museum of Scotland (see link 2 below). His review reads like a cursory sprint through this major gallery.
It is a shame he did not have the time to understand, appreciate and enjoy this enormously successful project, which has had a hugely positive response from the public and other reviewers.
The gallery is accused of "triumphalism" and avoiding controversy. Did the reviewer miss entire sections looking at Scotland's poor health record and problems with drug and alcohol addiction, the exploration of religion and sectarianism or the displays on women's rights and trade unions? In his complaint about coverage of social history, did he miss the displays on leisure, sport, emigration and the 25 personal stories spread throughout the gallery?
With regard to his suggestion of a lack of "films, tapes and discs" did the reviewer not spot the specially commissioned film One Nation: Five Million Voices, for which we interviewed more than 100 people on life in modern Scotland? Did he skip past the no fewer than 10 other films spread across the gallery, covering subjects from shipbuilding and tenement living to the story of Ravenscraig steelworks?
The gallery, which has been more than three years in the making, and represents an enormous amount of hard work and dedication by our staff, as well the involvement of people from all sections of the community across Scotland.
Comments from others speak for themselves. In Scotland Magazine, they included: "This is the museum's most thought-provoking presentation to date. . . it took me a full week to digest what there was to be seen on that one floor alone - and even then I am having to go back for a second circuit."
The Times Educational Supplement wrote: "In an ideal world, every school in Scotland would have its own replica of Scotland: A Changing Nation."
Gordon Rintoul, director, National Museums Scotland
Mark Taylor, the director of the Museums Association, is half-right about the problems created by the arranged partnership between museums, libraries and archives (see link 1 below).
But I think it has more to do with the failure of the Museums, Archives and Libraries Council (MLA) to deliver real services, and the collapse in stakeholder involvement at regional level, which will lead to its self-induced abolition. This is another structural change that the museum community will have no real say in. The sad thing is I feel we do need a strong national agency that will fight the non-national museum sector's corner.
Taylor is right that the MLA does not create an intuitive partnership between sectors that have less in common than first meets the eye. But I feel that the MLA's underperformance warrants greater concern than its structural make up, in particular the demise of a regional structure that had grassroots support.
The gradual development of the area museum councils (AMCs), and their successor bodies since the 1960s was destroyed without any foresight by its masters at Queen's Gate. The closest thing to a museum strategy in the last 10 years, Renaissance in the Regions, clearly mapped out a role for AMCs.
The cause of the MLA's decline, at least in the regions, is its failure to be relevant and accountable to its stakeholders. Abandoning or reducing services like a grants schemes, professional advice, career development and training, yet at the same time claiming that a strategic body does not become involved in practical support, is a surefire way of becoming redundant.
All the AMCs were able to attract real local buy-in through their subscriptions from local authorities and independents and include their constituency in their governance, something that the MLA felt was unimportant or was unaware of. A damning indictment, as local government funding for the museum sector is at crisis point, something that should be a priority for the MLA.
The uneasy discussions about accreditation suggest that the last remnants of useful services to the sector are going to be largely pushed onto the hub museums and/or the Collections Trust. Why then have the MLA at all?
Stephen Lowy, AMA
MLA 2: missed chance
Mark Taylor questions what has been achieved since 1999 in bringing museums, libraries and archives together. As he observes, the answer is very little.
We should be asking senior figures in the three domains, and MLA in particular, about the dearth of investment and leadership in this area. Is slow progress due to lack of vision? Are we too busy to look beyond our narrow horizons? Do people feel threatened? Is it just too difficult?
Taylor contends that the domains don't have a lot in common. For some museums, libraries and archives, that may be true. Library services dominated by modern books have a limited amount in common with museums and archives. But many libraries have special collections of older books, held in perpetuity, just like archives and museums.
Museums often have archives and even libraries. Many archives hold artefacts. Collection managers share concerns about custodial care, security, environment, conservation and mediated access. Libraries and archives have both learnt from museums about popular exhibitions. Museums have much to learn from libraries and archives about cataloguing, hubs and shared databases.
For an older collection like ours at Aberdeen University, many of our holdings were acquired in mixed collections of books, manuscripts and artefacts, subsequently separated and eventually ending up in our library, archives or various museums.
Material that once was closely coherent became highly dispersed and now difficult to trace. Our challenge is to facilitate this reassembly, intellectually, if not physically. Many organisations share similar aims, and wish to see this thinking extended to higher levels.
When one of our users asks what we know about a particular person, place or subject, they don't care who has the information, and it's up to us to make it easy for them to find it. There are also efficiencies to be made in shared conservation, exhibition or education teams, or at least shared expertise. That we have not achieved more through convergence is a disservice to our users.
Alan Knox, head of historic collections, University of Aberdeen
MLA 3: shared aims
As an independent historian who works for a museum, has worked in the past as a librarian and an archivist, and who regularly consults collections held in all three sectors, I must take issue with Mark Taylor's attack on a joined-up approach to our sector.
If we are so different, how come we share collections? Which service holds the local newspaper collections in your area? I bet it's different to the neighbouring area. I can guarantee all three will hold ephemera, and almost certainly all three will hold documents.
Of course, all three sectors have common purpose and common concerns. Worried that historians don't care about material culture?
Then put museum collections information onto the local archives service database, where the historians will be looking, and house them in the same building. Better still, put your local history and reference library collections on the same database.
Concerned about your footfall? Put some of the library's public access computers in the museum, provide museum displays in the library, and make archives accessible in both. The placing of archives reading rooms into libraries may be the result of cost-cutting, but it's a boon for researchers to have reference collections available in the same room as the documents.
Taylor lists a number of differences between museums, libraries and archives, which are either non-existent or trivial. So what if libraries don't use (many) volunteers? So what if there are more independent charitable trusts in the museum sector? And besides, many archives are independent, and quite a lot are charitable trusts.
Taylor says: "many marketing concerns of museums have little or no resonance in libraries and archives" but my three favourite libraries all have a cafe and a shop - and incidentally, all three house the local archives, and two have museum display space.
Taylor is clearly more interested in being the king of a small state than the prince of one part of a federal state. I wouldn't mind that, if it wasn't so damaging for the public who we are meant to care so passionately about.
Mark Nixon, Bonnybridge, Stirlingshire
Unfair review
I was disappointed to read the bizarre review by Julian Spalding of our new gallery, Scotland: A Changing Nation, which covers the entire top floor of the National Museum of Scotland (see link 2 below). His review reads like a cursory sprint through this major gallery.
It is a shame he did not have the time to understand, appreciate and enjoy this enormously successful project, which has had a hugely positive response from the public and other reviewers.
The gallery is accused of "triumphalism" and avoiding controversy. Did the reviewer miss entire sections looking at Scotland's poor health record and problems with drug and alcohol addiction, the exploration of religion and sectarianism or the displays on women's rights and trade unions? In his complaint about coverage of social history, did he miss the displays on leisure, sport, emigration and the 25 personal stories spread throughout the gallery?
With regard to his suggestion of a lack of "films, tapes and discs" did the reviewer not spot the specially commissioned film One Nation: Five Million Voices, for which we interviewed more than 100 people on life in modern Scotland? Did he skip past the no fewer than 10 other films spread across the gallery, covering subjects from shipbuilding and tenement living to the story of Ravenscraig steelworks?
The gallery, which has been more than three years in the making, and represents an enormous amount of hard work and dedication by our staff, as well the involvement of people from all sections of the community across Scotland.
Comments from others speak for themselves. In Scotland Magazine, they included: "This is the museum's most thought-provoking presentation to date. . . it took me a full week to digest what there was to be seen on that one floor alone - and even then I am having to go back for a second circuit."
The Times Educational Supplement wrote: "In an ideal world, every school in Scotland would have its own replica of Scotland: A Changing Nation."
Gordon Rintoul, director, National Museums Scotland
Links
1. Museums Journal, September 2008, p17
2. Museums Journal, September 2008, p48
1. Museums Journal, September 2008, p17
2. Museums Journal, September 2008, p48
