Opinion
Are museums doing enough to address LGBT history?
The question of whether museums are doing enough to address Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) audiences has been debated in Museums Journal before (see link below). It was previously suggested that few museums or galleries had addressed the need to collect, frame and interpret the lives of LGBT people, and that few institutions had …
Letters
The legacy of a language Bannaghtyn. (Greetings.) You can’t tell from this written communication that I retain a Lancashire accent and occasionally use dialect phrases picked up from the county of my birth. My schoolteachers would be ashamed of me – because they did their best to stop me “talking common”. I am pleased they …
Museums need to become public learning spaces
Fresh perspectives can seem a luxury when the immediate concern is with hard choices about what to preserve and safeguard, as public spending slithers down the cliff. So when a small group of us met at the invitation of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council to discuss ideas for the future under the “leading museums” …
Take advantage of the Chinese museum Zeitgeist or miss out
I have just returned from a British Council-sponsored visit of Chinese museums with a group of colleagues from the UK. It was a trip of a lifetime and left me reeling from the number and nature of new experiences – all of them positive. The 21st century is China’s century and the major advances in …
Letters
Supporting small and medium-sized museums Small and medium-sized local museums make up the majority of the museum sector. They survive on small budgets with small multi-tasking staff teams. They are always vulnerable to local budget cuts but are strongly supported by their volunteers and communities. Are they represented by the Museums Association (MA)? You will …