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

Abstract

Surveys of the UK museum sector have all had subtly different remits and so represent the sector in a variety of ways. In the last three decades, surveys have almost invariably focused on accredited institutions, thereby omitting almost 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 was and is represented as a professionalised sphere. Yet, while is important to understand the role of surveys in constructing the museum sector, this article goes beyond critique to show how the inclusion of unaccredited museums drastically changes the profile of the museum sector. We outline the inclusive approach that the Mapping Museums project team has taken with regards to data collection, and compare our findings with those that are 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

Untitled

“…Debido a eso, se requiere el compromiso de todas las partes implicadas en el desarrollo del museo y sus acciones de activación y difusión patrimonial. El conjunto de stakeholders, desde los gestores, a la comunidad local, las empresas y el visitante, como actor principal al que se destinan los esfuerzos de mantenimiento y actualización de la oferta museística, se conforma como núcleo de las posibles estrategias encaminadas a las buenas prácticas (Soren, 2005) en la gobernanza de la institución (Candlin et al, 2020).…”

A geography of UK museums

“…The data collection relevant to this national snapshot continued well into 2020. The temporal and historical dynamics of the openings and closures of museums that led to this state of affairs are outside the scope of this analysis and are addressed in detail in other studies (e.g., Candlin et al, 2020b).…”

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

“…A key part of the project has involved eliciting the evolving knowledge and requirements of the project's humanities scholars by means of iterative, participatory design of a new RDF/S Knowledge Base to store the data and metadata relating to the museums, and a Web Application allowing them to browse, search and visualise the data in order to investigate their research questions 3 . This paper describes the challenges we faced in developing the Knowledge Base (KB) and Web Application (Web App), the methodology and methods we adopted, the design and implementation of the KB and Web App, and the design and outcomes of a user evaluation study undertaken with a diverse group of independent museum experts.…”

“…There is no comprehensive information of the museums currently in existence, museums that have closed, or the subject matter of these museums, and visitor numbers are only recorded for accredited museums, which make up only around 50% of the total. There are particular gaps in the data with respect to small independent museums run by community or special interest groups, and there are no longitudinal records whatsoever [3]. Without this information, it is impossible to understand the emergence, evolution and wider impact of the UK museums sector, or to grasp the history of the sector as a whole.…”

“…Funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), 2016-2020, Ref AH/N007042/1. 2 www.mappingmuseums.org3 We use here the term "knowledge base" to refer to both the ontology (RDFS) and instance data (RDF) aspects of our new resource.…”