UK Museums Research Articles

Care, repair, and the future social relevance of museums

ABSTRACT This intervention reflects on examples of UK museum and gallery outreach and engagement activity that took place during the COVID-19 lockdown. This included creative packs sent to people who were shielding, online sessions for mental health service users, and phone services for isolated older adults, part of a range of efforts to continue connections while buildings were closed. Though seemingly limited in scale or impact, I argue that it is in these small acts of care that we might find the renewed relevance of the museum. Drawing on theoretical work on repair (notably Steven J. Jackson), the essay outlines a future social role of museums founded on “care thinking” and oriented towards the communal work of repair.

Exhibition Making in Crisis: Professional Identity and Radical Museum Exhibition Design in Britain after the Second World War

Abstract This article examines the shifting professional identities and forms of exhibition design that were activated by the post-war crisis in UK museums. Drawing on professional publications and museum archives across the UK, it focuses on museum exhibition design for ‘ethnographic collections’ between 1945 and 1965. It documents the sense of collections excess that occurred as objects returned from war-time storage to their bomb-damaged museums; it highlights how – as funding, materials and government attention turned to reconstruction elsewhere – museum staff faced this crisis alone. The article identifies two key tropes in post-war museum exhibition design that relate to this crisis. Both draw upon a ‘makeshift’ approach and both can be aligned with a ‘Do-It-Yourself’ ethic associated with a shortage of professional labour and more democratic modes of production. Firstly, some exhibition makers responded with creativity and innovation, drawing on new materials and commercial and artistic practices to design exhibitions that were radical for museums at this time. Without external support, museum technicians took a leading role in this experimental practice. Secondly, curatorial apathy towards display temporarily carved out inclusive spaces for artists, academics and local communities to design their own exhibitions in ways that remain radical in museums even today.

Museums as supportive workplaces: an empirical enquiry in the UK museum workforce

ABSTRACT Museums’ vibrancy and viability are heavily dependent on supporting the development and well-being of talented and dedicated people. Although issues of organisational culture and good management have gained increasing importance for the sector, there is little empirical research on how leadership and day-to-day work conditions in museums shape workers’ job satisfaction and organisational commitment. Framed through organisation theory, this paper draws on survey data from UK museum staff and volunteers to examine the role of transformational leadership in driving workforce job satisfaction and organisational commitment outcomes, as mediated by key job resources and demands. Our findings show that where a transformational approach to leadership effectively communicates a shared organisational mission there is a positive impact on worker attitudes. Practical measures are suggested on how museum leaders can achieve such outcomes by inviting worker participation in decision-making, promoting a sense of task significance, highlighting impact on museum beneficiaries and reducing role ambiguity.

Digital Responses of UK Museum Exhibitions to the COVID-19 Crisis, March - June 2020.

The impact of the COVID‐19 Crisis on museums and galleries has been paramount, with the sector taking on long‐term recovery plans. This paper examines this crisis in the context of temporary exhibition programmes of UK museums, studying online content for 21 museums with exhibitions due to open between March and June 2020. Analysis was conducted, noting how COVID was considered, how content was presented, and discussing the emerging themes of access, embodiment, and human connection. In considering these results in the context of wider digital heritage literature, several questions are raised in terms of how digital content is conceptualised, presented, and valued. At a crucial turning point in the sector, these aspects will need to be considered as museums and galleries continue to adapt in light of a post‐COVID world where practices, both digital and physical, will undoubtedly shift.

Torcedores como patrimônio: envolvendo torcedores para contar a história por inteiro

This text provides an overview of the Manchester United Museum’s size and scope, as well as a more in-depth look at how the museum’s collections are managed. Visitor demographics and their interactions with collections are examined, as are the ways in which they form emotional connections with museum objects; recognising that visitors see themselves as standing within the club’s history rather than outside it. The report takes into account best practice at other UK museums as well as guidelines and reports produced by the UK’s Museums Association. These contextualise the ways in which the Manchester United Museum has worked to better engage with visitors, through public participation and community projects. The way oral history interviews are now being employed to gather stories about the club is also discussed, as well as the challenges faced when trying to find and record underrepresented demographics. Finally, the report briefly looks at how the museum is following the lead of other departments in the club moving towards achieving a greater online presence, in order to continue to engage with global fans in the face of an unprecedented pandemic.

Learning to Let Go: Ownership, Rights, Fees, and Permissions of Readers’ Photographs

Abstract This article explores the variance in attitudes towards user photography in UK libraries, archives, and museums. It examines the various interpretations of copyright and rights to reproduce images of items in the public domain deployed by cultural heritage institutions, the cost structures for user photography in the reading room, and the historic reasons for these decisions. Finally, this article explores the impact of the multiplicity of regulations on the researcher and the benefits of a clear and open approach to access and to the new research methods being employed by readers.

‘Culture for Sale’: The Effects of Corporate Colonization on the UK Museum Sector

For the United Kingdom, the 2008 financial crisis coupled with the subsequent economic austerity programme forced many public institutions to engage in various cost-cutting and fundraising ventures. In parallel, corporate ideologies came to dominate how academics, officials and professionals debated public activities, in turn profoundly affecting the provision of communal services. This paper explores how ‘corporate colonization’ ( sensu Deetz, 1992), fuelled by austerity, claims public institutions for commercial interests. Drawing on in-depth interviews with senior staff, this paper demonstrates how retrenchment of external support in the UK museum sector has been an uneven process, resulting in the manifestation of three experiential states of corporate colonization: organizational perennity, organizational perseverance and organizational precarity. We thus investigate the differential and uneven ways in which corporate colonization affects organizations pertaining to the UK cultural sector. Overall, we argue that the austerity culture in the UK affects museums in largely negative ways by forcing them to respond to the progressive need to satisfy short-term financial interests.

Exploring factors associated with participation in citizen science among UK museum visitors aged 40-60: A qualitative study using the theoretical domains framework and the capability opportunity motivation-behaviour model.

Citizen science has grown as a form of public engagement in science. Middle-aged citizens who are already consuming scientific information should be a potential outreach group. Behaviour change research in citizen science participation among the demographic is lacking. A total of 47 museum visitors aged 40-60 years took part in qualitative questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis with the aid of theoretical domains framework and capability opportunity motivation-behaviour model revealed eight themes: (1) limited awareness of citizen science; (2) curiosity, competence and other significant characteristics and skills; (3) important beliefs about one's capability; (4) importance of clear project purpose and impacts; (5) interest, enjoyment and incentives; (6) lasting impacts of family upbringing; (7) project details that make participation easy, better project promotion; and (8) the living environment, availability of free time and money. Addressing a maximum number of these factors with behaviour change techniques can improve the likelihood of citizen science participation.

Lunar Crater Models

Abstract This article traces the story of three amateur astronomers who created relief models to help them depict the changing illumination of certain lunar craters, examples of which can be found in UK museum collections today. English chemist Henry Blunt (1806–1853) adopted the emerging technology of electrotyping to reproduce and distribute his plaster model of the Eratosthenes crater to a wider audience. Scottish industrial engineer James Nasmyth (1808–1890) used a combination of drawing, modelling and photography to support his thesis on the volcanic origin of lunar craters in his popular book The Moon Considered … (1874). Spanish sculptor Dionis Renart (1878–1946) produced a series of plaster models for the Exposición General De Estudios Lunares (1912) that eventually came to Greenwich via the British selenographer Hugh Percy Wilkins (1896–1960). These three case studies provide us with valuable insights into the rationale behind the production, use and distribution of lunar crater models within amateur and popular astronomy.

FromDeath in the Iceto life in the museum: Absence, affect and mystery in the Arctic

Ever since its disappearance in the mid-19th-century, the fate of the ‘Franklin expedition’ has attracted interest and intrigue. The story has been told and re-told but remained one of ‘mystery’ into the early 21st-century. When the expedition’s two ships were finally located, the narrative shifted with the reappearance of long-absent objects and materials – in turn, posing challenges for museum curators seeking to re-present the story. In this article, we conduct a side-by-side examination of two sites: the 1845 Franklin expedition in the Northwest Passage and the 2017 Death in the Ice exhibition at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, UK. We juxtapose these to consider the forces unleashed by the ships’ absence and their presence-ing first in Victorian times and then in the UK museum space today. By analysing the sites through the concept of ‘absent presence’, the agency of both the material and the immaterial is powerfully highlighted. Via an emphasis on the relation of the absent presence to the sensing bodies of others, we consider the concept as simultaneous and co-constitutive. That is, absence and presence ought to be understood not as objective states, but as becoming-absent and becoming-present: processes that are dependent on curated and embodied sensibilities.

The Business of Language & the Language of Business: Neoliberal Performativity & Hegemonic Discourse

Austerity measures and neoliberal policies have deeply affected the UK cultural sector. In particular they have been central to cementing the idea that contemporary cultural institutions should henceforth be regarded as commercial operations. As the language of business and management increasingly frames how organizations of the cultural sector are described, this paper seeks to define the main discursive practices motivating this performative repositioning. Drawing theoretically from J. L. Austin’s (1962) landmark philosophical work on performativity, and building empirically on in-depth interviews with senior staff across the UK museum sector, we argue that the incursion of business language has served to reshape the ‘reality’ of the sector. This has been achieved, primarily, by materialising what we term conceptually a new hegemonic performative discourse – one based on notions of monetisation, productivity and rebranding. In order to understand current and possibly future dilemmas facing the management and organization of museums, we assess the consequences of this new commercial discourse as it becomes framed as strategically superior to that of its historic conservational and educational counterpart.

What is a Museum? A new approach

The Mapping Museums research team recently compiled a dataset of UK museums. In doing so, we had to decide what counted as a museum. In this paper, we outline our initial approaches for establishing the criteria for selection: using definitions; key characteristics; and self-identification; and describe why they proved inadequate with respect to the heterogeneity of museum practice. We then explain how assemblage theory helped us conceptualise the complex realities of the museum sector and to address the problem of selection, which in turn led to our developing a non-essentialising model of museums and a new account of the UK museum sector.

Struggles for distinction: Classing as discursive process in UK museum work

This article responds to calls from critical diversity scholars to explore class in context, arguing for a view of classing as a discursive process and adopting Bourdieu's concept of field as a site of discursive struggle. Analysing interview, web and focus group data, we address this in the field of UK museum work. We contextualize the field's dynamic nature, highlighting its state of flux and explore three discourses: distinguishing the field; disavowing the market; and gaining recognition through which it is constituted, and classing practised. Discursive strategies of reinforcing, reframing and re‐valorizing were deployed by participants to legitimate their own and other positions in the field. We show how classing is a core process constituting an occupational field, how museum workers are entrapped by and complicit in this process, and conclude with wider implications for understandings of class, classed inequality and diversity.

Delivering the National Trust's preservation purpose: mission, strategy and structure

Whilst reporting on numerical-based activities such as income versus expenditure is relatively straightforward for organisations seeking to understand their progress in meeting their objectives, it is more difficult to present nonnumerical-based activities such as conservation and preservation in similar terms. However, without numerical key performance indicators (KPIs) conservation activities risk becoming invisible in organisational reporting, compared to activities that are easier to measure, such as, in heritage organisations that open their assets to the public, visitor numbers and income. The National Trust for England, Wales and Northern Ireland has devised a numerical measure to describe relative performance in reaching defined conservation standards, benchmarked against external standards such as the Canadian Conservation Institute's 'Agents of Deterioration' framework and the UK's Museum Accreditation Scheme. This paper describes the development and practice of this measure, the Conservation Performance Indicator (CPI), with particular reference to cultural heritage features, such as historic interiors, collections, buildings and archaeology, and in the context of the evolution of a devolved structure.

Museums and the Traps of Social Media: The Case of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum

In this article I discuss both the recent threats as well as opportunities posed by social media to the activities of museums, taking into account social media’s importance as an evolving space of both social outreach and social activism. Recalling the controversies around the U.S. and UK museums’ social media responses to George Floyd’s death, I argue that museums run the risk of politicization and entanglement in controversial issues which are not necessarily linked to their profile and mission. I analyse museums’ social media guidelines, good practices, and mission statements, and posit that they play a fundamental role in integrating the new realm of the Web 2.0 into traditional museum activities. My main case study and example of good practice is the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. It has constantly embedded general ethical and educational principles and guidelines of Holocaust commemoration and education into its more than 60-years’ experience in dealing with and taming political and cultural controversies surrounding this memory site of universal importance, and this embeddedness lies at the core of its social media activity. Defined as an “online community of remembrance”, it consists of well-thought-out initiatives which aim at informing the public about the everyday history of the camp, involving itself in the current commemorations and anniversaries, and rectifying simplifications and misinformation about Auschwitz and the Holocaust. I also analyse the fundamental role played by the official social media profiles in managing the crisis which arose at the beginning of 2018 with the amendment of the socalled “Holocaust Law” in Poland.

Understanding and managing patchy data in the UK museum sector

ABSTRACT It is well accepted that the museum sector has a longstanding problem with data collection and management. This article begins by exploring problems with gaining access to data, poor archiving and coverage, and the absence of data. We then explain how the Mapping Museums research team set out to remedy the lack of longitudinal data on the UK museum sector in the period between 1960 and 2020. Initially we collated and supplemented existing information on UK museums but it was impossible to fill some gaps or resolve some inconsistencies in the data. Here we discuss how we designed a database that was sensitive to the patchiness of the material, and that could model uncertain and absent data in computational terms. To close, we briefly comment on how our data enables research on museum history and on how the problems with data collection in the sector might be remedied in the longer term.

Creating a Knowledge Base to Research the History of UK Museums through Rapid Application Development

Several studies have highlighted the absence of an integrated comprehensive dataset covering all of the UK’s museums, hence impeding research into the emergence, evolution, and wider impact of the UK’s museums sector. “Mapping Museums” is an interdisciplinary project aiming to develop a comprehensive database of UK museums in existence since 1960, and to use this to undertake an evidence-based analysis of the development of the UK’s museum sector during 1960--2020 and the links to wider cultural, social, and political concerns. A major part of the project has been the iterative, participatory design of a new RDF/S Knowledge Base to store data and metadata relating to the UK’s museums, and a Web Application for the project’s humanities scholars to browse, search, and visualise the data to investigate their research questions. This article presents the challenges we faced in developing the Knowledge Base and Web Application, our methodology and methods, the design and implementation of the system, and the design, outcomes, and implications of a user trial undertaken with a group of experts from the UK’s museums sector.

The missing museums: accreditation, surveys, and an alternative account of the UK museum sector

ABSTRACT Surveys of the UK museum sector all have subtly different remits and so represent the sector in a variety of ways. Since the 1980s, surveys have almost invariably focused on accredited institutions, thereby omitting half of the museums in the UK. In this article we examine how data collection became tied to the accreditation scheme and its effects on how the museum sector is represented as a professionalised sphere. While is important to understand the role of surveys in constructing the museum sector, this article also demonstrates how the inclusion of unaccredited museums drastically changes the profile of the museum sector. We outline the inclusive research methodology of the Mapping Museums project team and compare our findings with those produced when a survey is limited to accredited museums. In so doing, we sketch out an alternative, heterogeneous version of the UK museum sector and make recommendations based on that evidence.

Cultural diplomacy and internationalism in regional art institutions

This study posits that current cultural diplomacy practice in UK museums and galleries could be significantly improved. Indeed, cultural diplomacy is commonly viewed as nationalist propaganda. An attempt to theoretically debunk this proposition indicates that greater understanding between peoples can be engendered by unifying the ideologies of internationalism and liberalism in the cultural sector. Liberalism is viewed as the present ideology operating in Museums and Galleries whilst internationalism is considered as a nascent force. Working in symbiosis, liberalism allows for a multiplicity of discourse whilst internationalism allows for a critical reappraisal of the status quo and nation-state hegemony. Indeed, a multiplicity of dialogic discourse is essential for cultural institutions to maintain a non-hegemonic stance. This is, of course, particularly apparent in contemporary art work which can often be subversive of national governments and the very idea of a nation-state. Further to this, a form of localised cultural diplomacy can reach the public at large and question the cultural capital of world centres. Empirically speaking, the exhibition format is used as a means to render cultural diplomacy palatable for public consumption. Hence, the UK case study Art from Elsewhere will be introduced which has rendered the international a normative presence in local art galleries. This 2014–2016 exhibition comprised a tour of recent contemporary art acquisitions in regional permanent collections which were funded by a £5 million pound grant from the UK charitable organisation, Art Fund. Instead of monophonic exhibitions emanating from one nation, Art from Elsewhere engenders a multilateral dialogue catalysed by the polyphonic nature of artists from several different nations whose works are juxtaposed both in conflict, symmetry and contrast to one another.

‘Culture for Sale’: The Effects of Corporate Colonization on the UK Museum Sector

‘Culture for Sale’: The Effects of Corporate Colonization on the UK Museum Sector