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Not so long ago people were questioning the relevance of membership organisations for museum workers.  I include myself in those who doubted.

The national and regional QuANGOs seemed to provide more than the membership organisations ever could.  They seemed to have a seat at the Government’s top table and exert influence in a way other bodies could not.  More importantly, they had money and teeth.

Some may question the way that the money was distributed and used, but there is no questioning that the flow of cash from MLA to the Regional MLAs and the Renaissance teams made a huge impact.  The structures that existed also ensured that the voice of the grass roots professional was heard.  The regional Renaissance Executive Boards (which were made up of regional museum leaders) had a great deal of power to decide how the millions that flowed from the centre were spent.  The Regional MLA boards were also representative of the sector and formed part of the “Golden Thread” (ghastly term) through to central government.

Compared to this, the membership organisations were poor.  They did have some money, but, by comparison, not a great deal.  The regional Federations and the Museums’ Association could provide training, but at a cost.  It was openly questioned why one would travel to London and pay over £100 for a training day when one was available free of charge on your doorstep, delivered by Renaissance.  The membership organisations did provide grants, but on nowhere near the scale of the QuANGOs.

But perhaps most importantly, the QuANGOs could weald power.  Not only did they have strong advocacy skills, they also commented on and supported grant applications made to a number of bodies.  Through their involvement in Accreditation they could threaten to disbar individual museums should they contravene ethical standards.  From this, they could be excluded from funding opportunities, and their reputations damaged. 

In comparison, the membership bodies did not seem to have the same impact.  Their sole penalty for unethical behaviour seemed to be limited to exclusion from that membership body.  The impact of this appeared to be minimal.

True, the membership bodies did have an advocacy voice.  The trouble was that this advocacy message somehow seemed weaker since they were less powerful bodies.

But about two years ago this started to change.  The wind up of the regional MLAs and the centralisation of many functions was one part of it, but there were wider changes on the horizon.  The Labour administration seemed to be heading to electoral defeat, the next Comprehensive Spending Review was in the offing, there was no guarantee of a continuation of the Renaissance programme and the banking crisis was just starting.  Everything that had seemed so certain in the past was suddenly no so certain.  It was not that we had lost faith in the QuANGOs and their structure, it was more that we could not predict what their future was.

At this time I was sitting on the board of the North West Federation of Museums and Art Galleries.  The board considered the future and decided not to adopt a ‘wait and see’ attitude.  Instead, it would start to prepare for post MLA/Renaissance world.  This was not to wish their demise (indeed, the Fed still has a good working relationship with both organisations) but simply wanted to be in the right shape to take on a leadership role if it was required.

The first step was a review of the governance.  An analysis showed that the current set up would not be appropriate if the Fed was going to raise its game.  With the support of Business in the Arts the Fed became a Charity and Company Limited by Guarantee.  The governance structure was also changed.  The board became smaller and more business orientated.  The principle of ‘One Member One Vote’ also changed with increased powers given to the Directors and Members who sat on the board.

The changes quickly lead to benefits.  A new partnership was established with National Museums Liverpool.  The Fed employed a part time co-ordinator.  It developed a partnership with North West museums that lead to a £350,000 Heritage Lottery Fund award.  Perhaps most importantly, it sits as an equal partner with National Museums Liverpool, MLA and Renaissance North West in the development of a North West Museums Strategy.  It is now seen as a credible force for museums in the North West.

None of these benefits could have occurred without the governance changes.  The Board is now slick and efficient in a way that it was not before.  It is able to spot opportunities and react quickly.  The Board has the authority to act as it sees fit, and it does so.  Whatever happens to the national and regional structures over the next 18 months, the Fed is strong enough to act and react in the best interests of the museum professionals it represents.

This is why next week’s Museums’ Association’s Conference is so important.  The MA is doing a fantastic job in responding to the challenges that museums are facing now and will be facing over the next few years.  But it is stymied by a governance structure that simple does not fit with the organisations ambitions.  The structure is unwieldy and the decision making process is inefficient.  Next weeks vote is set to change this by adopting a Board similar in form and powers to that adopted by the Fed.

Membership organisations may have appeared irrelevant in the past, but we can no longer afford for them to be an irrelevance.  A strong, independent voice that is free from political whim is what we need right now.  The MA has the potential to deliver this, but needs our support.  If you are at the MA Conference in Manchester next week and are unsure whether to vote or how to vote, ask yourself this: “Who can provide an independent voice for the museum profession over the next five years, and do I want them to have a strong voice”?

I know that it is probably unfashionable to say this, but I do like The Trafford Centre.  I don't like it as a shopping experience (something I find so ghastly that I feel like chewing my own head off) but architecturally I think it is magnificent.  The interior is unapologetically grotesque (in the word's original sence) and has an arrogance and swagger that few other buildings would have the courage to try to pull off.  I like to think that if Sid James became Emperor of the World, this would be the palace he would build for himself.

When I originally heard of Museum of Museums I had hoped that some of this self confidence and glitz would rub off – after all, both have the same parent company.  I expected it to heavy on spectacle and light on GLOs, providing a similar experience to the ‘museums’ found in Las Vegas Casinos.  I had no expectations that the museum would provide a cohesive educational experience.  And I do not necessarily think that this would be a bad thing.  The positioning of the museum next to the Trafford Centre would mean that its target audience would be shoppers looking for a break, or somewhere to leave the Dads and Lads whilst the rest of the family carried on.  In these circumstances the wow factor should be of utmost importance if it is to engage an audience that is quite possibly bored and tired.  Also, there was enormous potential to attract non-traditional museum audiences into the facility.  If they had a fun, spectacular experience, they may be tempted to visit more of the museums in Manchester.  A ‘Museum Lite’ experience could provide just enough of a thrill for them to try some of the proper stuff.

I knew from Sally Fort’s recent blog post that the museum had not got off to a great start.  However I had heard that more objects were arriving at the museum.  Hopefully the feeling of sparseness would pass so I left it a few weeks before deciding to visit.  The very first impressions seemed to back up Sally’s thoughts.  Whilst the museum was reasonably well sign posted I was directed on a circuitous route through as much of the Trafford Centre as possible.  This backed up the assumption that the museum was an additional facility for shoppers rather than a destination in itself.  After about 20 minutes I arrived at the fairly non-descript entrance and was greeted by a list of things that I could not do (any ambitions to undertake drunk roller-skating at the museum will be quickly thwarted) and a sign that the museum was still free.  This I found depressing.  If the museum was still free that probably meant that it hadn’t developed much since Sally’s visit.

But when I entered the museum, my heart did leap a little.  Any feeling of sparseness soon disappeared.  To my immediate right was a collection of cars from the Coventry Transport Museum and to my immediate left a couple of trams from Heaton Park Tramway.  The collection of cars had a small amount of interpretation which had been lifted straight from their home museum.  These gave a brief explanation of each car and why they were significant to Coventry.  The cars were not displayed, as such.  There was no sense of design or exhibition, but it was an interesting enough collection and I spent a few minutes with them.  When I started moving further around the collection of cars things started to look a little odd.  I was soon amongst a selection of cars with no interpretation and no connection to Coventry.  An MG, Renault, and Crossley, all in wonderful (if perhaps over-restored) condition were also present.  It seemed unlikely that these were also part of the Coventry collection, but there was no explanation of what they were doing there, or indeed what each individual car was.

When emerging from this area I realised that my initial impressions had been something of an illusion.  Objects had been carefully positioned around the entrance to create an impression of a full museum, but the further I walked into the place, the more sparse the displays became.  After walking past a corporate display from Robinsons Brewery and a display selling art that would look magnificent in a Star Wars themed Premier Inn, I thought that it had come to an end.  Or rather, the museum had lost the will to continue and had petered out.  But then, in the distance, I spotted a Green Goddess Fire Engine.

The trek to the Goddess exposed two of the major problems with the museum.  Firstly, there was not nearly enough stuff , resulting in a feeling of sparseness and abandonment.  Secondly, there had been no attempt to disguise the building’s origins.  Until recently this was a distribution centre for Argos.  The floor markings associated with a warehouse were still there.  Notices warned me to keep a mindful eye out for fork lift trucks; floor markings showed where the pallets of TVs should be placed.  Vegas sparkle and razzmatazz were non-existent.  This was open storage. 

Turning back on myself, things did improve.  The display from The Anson Engine Museum was quite thoughtfully put together.  It had a clearly demarked and branded ‘patch’, a selection of nicely cared for engines, and some minimal interpretation.  A few design touches here and there helped create a cohesive look for this display which certainly said something about the Anson Museum itself.  This was perhaps the most successful part of the museum: it gave a small taster of the Anson which may encourage visitors to explore further.  

Exiting through the (closed and empty) café, I then entered the area that housed an exhibition from the National Football Museum.  This was a touring exhibition that had apparently visited a number of venues already and this was its current location, providing a presence in the city before the museum re-opens next year.  The usual high standards of interpretation and display that the National Football Museum achieves were present and an excellent selection of historic and iconic objects were present, but it did seem a little let down by its context.  The room was light and functional in a way that you would expect in an Argos warehouse office.  The star object (the oldest surviving FA cup) should have been presented and lit to look spectacular, but in this room it looked like the winnings of a Sunday League pub team.  The intervention of a number of ‘Do Not Touch’ signs around the display did not help with engagement, especially the one put next to the reproduction handling collection.  

The weekend paper colour supplements are not usually the type of place to find a three page spread devoted to an educational arts project.  It’s even more surprising to find such an article in the Financial Times ‘How to Spend It’ magazine – a magazine targeted at those who can easily consider spending over £20,000 on a watch. 

The project itself sounds commendable: a partnership between a sponsor and five high profile London Galleries (Hayward, Whitechaple, Tate Britain, Royal Academy and the South London Gallery) targeting underprivileged people aged 13 to 20 to expose them to “the transforming power of culture”.  Giving the project one million pounds over three years sounds remarkable.

But this is more that a simple act of benevolence by a multi-national company.  Sue Whiteley, the MD of the sponsors, Louis Vuitton is quite open about the motivation for the sponsorship.  She says “When we started to think about how to launch New Bond Street Maison [their new flagship store], the recession was obviously on our minds and it seemed we needed to be much more modest, more caring, more collaborative in our approach”.  The sponsorship needs to say something about the company’s attitudes.  And furthermore, these attitudes need to be seen.  The project has been launched with a very slick PR strategy that has generated massive amounts of positive coverage for the company.  This is not a cynical ploy.  As a publicly listed company Louis Vuitton has a legal obligation to uphold the interests of its share holders.  The company can be as magnanimous as it wants, so long as those actions work to the best interest of the shareholders, that is, they boost the share price.  It is inevitable that an act of sponsorship will cast the company in a good light in the most public way possible.

And this is what makes me uncomfortable with the Government’s idea of ‘American Philanthropy’.  The sheer scale of the United States makes it operate in a very different way to England.  Essentially the country is multi-nodal in a way that England can now never be.  This is not simply a transportation issue (although that does play a part) but also an economic and cultural issue.  Think of half a dozen big brands from the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the chances are that you will get half a dozen different towns listed as their Headquarters.  The same goes for the media.  The New York Times may be the newspaper of record, but many others have a national and international reach – I for one occasionally dip into the LA Times and the Chicago Sun-Times.  The dispersal of the American banking industry may be a result of legislation, but that does not make it any less real.  Now consider the same points in England.  For the larger part the companies that make up the FTSE 100 Index are based in or near London.  Every major newspaper in England is based in London – those that are not are generally considered ‘local’ – as are the major television companies.  Only one bank listed on the FTSE 100 Index is based outside London (and that is Royal Bank of Scotland). 

In practical terms, the major corporations that have the funds to give major sponsorship to museums and galleries, and the media that can provide the PR outlets that these companies need, only exist in a relatively small part of the country.  So that area of the country is likely to have an easier ride getting the funding.  And the problem could be exacerbated by the way that funding can be geared.  Seed funding can be used as matched funding for larger projects, so success can breed success and will create a greater pull for funds into the London area.

So does this cause me concern?  Well, as a resident of ‘the Regions’ it should.  I do not want to see the regions suffer from a lack of funding as London gets a bigger slice of the pie.  But it could also be quite exciting.    It is unlikely that we will be able to get the sponsoring companies to move away from London, so to attract the money we will have to have projects that generate the type of publicity that the sponsors crave: the type of ground breaking, stimulating projects that we know we can deliver, but now we have to deliver.

There will be winners and losers, of course, and we will have to have a new breed of cultural entrepreneurs to work with sponsors (so the curators can get on with what they do best) but the results could be magnificent.

This is probably one of the most exciting things I have read in quite a while: IWM Collections Review Manager 

OK, it’s just a job description, but I think that it could represent something of a culture change in museums in the UK.

Anybody who has spoken to me on professional matters over the last couple of years will know that I keep banging on about how dysfunctional I think some aspects of collections management are.  Most, if not all, museums are storing items that are not relevant to their collection, have little obvious use to them, or are all too often simply junk.

A great deal of work has been going on around the UK promoting Collections Reviews to tackle underused collections. The Museums’ Association’s Effective Collection is probably the most high profile, and there is fantastic work taking place through Renaissance North West and Museums Galleries Scotland.

But I have always felt a little uneasy on one aspect.  Some of the projects feel like they have been bolted on rather than integrated into the museum’s daily functions.  Some projects can be driven by a crisis, such as the impending closure of a store.  Others by a pragmatic reaction to grant funding for review projects becoming available.  Yet more by other specific events.  These projects can have great results but the results can be short term and isolated.  If collections management is really going to modernise then the culture needs to change.  This change needs to come right from Governance level downwards.  Collections reviews and disposals are going to have to become just as much a part of the museum’s everyday activity as acquisitions and documenting.

The job at Imperial War Museum seems to be doing just that.  The job has a serious salary and is suitably high up the hierarchy.  It has a team of reviewers, the post’s strategy is inter-twined with the museum’s Acquisition and Disposal Policy, and the job has corporate accountabilities.   Most importantly, the job does not seem to be driven by events, or look isolated from the museums team.  It looks corporately embedded and (despite its five year fixed term) may be the beginning of a culture change. Let’s see which other museums follow this lead.

In political terms, this feels like a really strange time.  A new government has been formed, but not in way that anybody would have predicted even a couple of weeks ago.  Rather than have a government sweep into power with its position on most things clearly defined, the coalition has resulted in uncertainly.   For museums (and other culture and heritage organisations) the uncertainty is greater.  For a while it was not certain who the Culture Secretary would be ^[1], and even the very name of his^[2] Department was changeable ^[3].  Information could not be gleaned from the leading party’s manifesto since museums were notable by their absence.

Against this backdrop of uncertainly, it would seem to be appropriate to undertake a little ill-informed speculation on what the next five years will hold for the museum sector – something that I can look back at in a couple of months and see how wrong I was. 

We do have a handful of facts.  The pre-election euphemism of ‘efficiency savings’ has now been defined.  Yesterday’s announcement by George Osborne made things very clear.

• £6bn in savings will be found during this financial year
• Front line services will not be affected
• Quangos will be first in line for cuts
• The specific allocation of the savings will be made in an announcement on Monday next week
• The date of 22^nd June has been set for the ‘Emergency Budget

The first thoughts that spring to mind are on free admission to the National Museums and the future for MLA.  I think both are safe. 

Free admission has been too much of a public success for it to be removed. For example National Museums Liverpool saw its visitor figures rise from 0.7 million visitors 2000 to 1.2million in 2001 with the introduction of free entry .  Admissions for 2009 were 2.2 million.  There is a strong economic argument for keeping the type of vigorous cultural sector that can only be brought through free admission.  This economic case is also being strengthened by the weakening pound: relatively cheap food, travel and accommodation with the added benefit of free days out makes the UK very attractive to foreign visitors.  ‘Staycations’ also become attractive as going abroad becomes more expensive and museums provide a cost effective way of spending a day when personal finances are increasingly tight.  This can only help with the balance of payments, something which must be considered by the Treasury when making budgetary decisions.

MLA has already done its hard work.  Reducing itself from a ten quango partnership to one organisation was a major change.  It appears that the future of Renaissance will take this centralisation further.  By being ahead of the political game, MLA will probably protect itself from further attention and survive being cut for financial reasons alone.

 So, what about the bad news?  Certainly money will be lost from the sector.  Figures such as 20% cuts have been bandied around, as well as £66m.  And this is just from the Culture budget – I do not know what the predicted cuts to local authority funding, regional development agencies or other regional agencies that contribute to the mix of funding.  Whatever cuts are made at a local level, they will most likely be felt by museums first.

If cuts were made at the levels being speculated, there would be a drastic and unpopular effect on the front-line services.  Museums are already quite a lean sector so even the smallest cuts would be seen by the public.  Even if the worst predictions came true the impact on the balances of the Exchequer would only be slight; after all 20% of not much is very little. Easy cuts can be made elsewhere in government spending that would that would give a bigger yield and provoke less popular protest.  For this reason, I do not think the cuts will be as big as these predictions.  But equally I do not think we will have will have the same situation as Holland where the argument on the high cost and low benefit of cuts to culture has lead to those budgets being completely ring-fenced.  All departments will need to be seen to be sharing the burden, and it has already been widely reported that Culture is not a high priority for the coalition.   So cuts are inevitable and they will undoubtedly be hard, and they will no doubt be wrapped in the jargon of ‘efficiency savings’.

But I think the biggest impact that we will experience is through a culture change in the way the museums are going to be funded.  The best indication that we probably have is from the speeches that Jeremy Hunt made before the elections campaign really got going.  It appears that as funding is withdrawn from the centre the money will be backfilled from other sources.  It is likely that there will be a redirection of funds from HLF to support more cultural activities, and there will be an expectation of museums asking for money from private sources.  The use of the term ‘American philanthropy’ as used by Hunt worries me greatly for reasons I will return to in another blog post, but this may well be the future for museum funding.

 The change in funding sources may lead to a change in the way that museums operate.  Projects may start to take precedence over core activities since these are an easier sell to external funders.  Projects may also have to be adapted to suite the priorities of the funders.  Museums and their governing body may no longer have sovereign power over their aims and objectives since they may have to be adapted to suite the demands of potential funders.  OK, this is the worst case scenario, but a move in that direction is a distinct possibility.

What is likely is that more time and resources are likely to be needed in order to secure funding.   Those museums that do not have the time or resources to develop strong bids have a number of options.

Firstly, museums can chose to try to squeeze bids for funding around their current activities.  Resources that are already stretched through the removal of core funding will be stretched further as time is spent on bid preparation.  There would be a risk that the bids would be unsuccessful since there is insufficient time available to properly prepare bids in what will be an increasingly competitive market.

Secondly, the museum could completely shift its emphasis to project based activities, directing a large proportion of its resources towards fund raising and project delivery.  Core activities would suffer as a result as insufficient attention is spent on them and the museum would get into a cycle where its ongoing existence is dependent on continual success in applications.

Neither of these scenarios is too far fetched.  There are certainly museums that are working to one or other of these models and they are suffering to some extent.  A museum that is following the first model is suffering slow decline as it experiences rejections on its hastily prepared funding bids.  A museum that is following the second model is surviving, but its accounts show its existence is precarious: it only needs to have or two bids fail for its main source of income to dry up resulting in staff losses and (as it does not have the infrastructure for day to day running) the museum would run the risk of a swift and complete closure.

There are however likely to be winners in the situation.  Clearly those museums that do have the resources to develop bids and nurture private giving will have the greatest chance of long term success.  These will be the larger national and regional museums, although the London based museums will be in the strongest for reasons I will discuss later.  It is likely that these museums will also benefit from being large enough to employ staff with specific entrepreneurial skills to widen the museums additional sources of income, or squeeze more of the secondary spend from their visitors.

The other winners will be those museums that are able to work effectively with their communities.  Cameron’s vision of ‘Big Society’ (which to me is just the same as saying ‘Small Government’) is part of the whole funding mix: remove the core funding, develop project streams and get the public to fill in the gaps.  But getting effective community involvement is not a quick win.  Nurturing communities, getting the best out of them and integrating them into the ‘mission’ of the museum takes time and effort.  There are many, many museums that already operate along these line, and they are also likely to succeed under the new regime.  The fact that many of these museums are independent trusts is not coincidental.  Maybe independent trust status is the way forward for the whole museum sector?

What are my feelings on this?  From a purely selfish point of view, as a consultant I do like the idea of an increased reliance on externally funded projects.  These are the type of jobs that I usually work on. But I think that it is bad news for some museums in the short term.  Over the next five years I think we will develop a three tier museum sector: large nationals and regional museums that have the clout to get the funds in; small to medium independents that have the communities to support them; and the small/medium mostly local authority museums that have their core budgets squeezed, be unable to get further support and run the risk of a slow decline. 

[1] It had been speculated that in a coalition the ‘lesser’ cabinet posts would go to the Lib-Dems, including Culture; [2] This is not lazy sexism. It was pretty inevitable it was going to be a ‘he’; [3] The official acronym of the department was briefly DCOMS before reverting to DCMS.  I was hoping for D:COMS, with a resurrection of Re:Source’s long missed colon

This is a downloadable version of a presentation I gave in Perth, Scotland for Museums Galleries Scotland on the subject of Collections Reviews.  It was the first session of the day, so rather than getting involved in too much detail on individual cases, it largely sets the context of why a museum may want to conduct a collections review.  The notes accompanying the slides are largely memory aids for me as I spoke, but there is enough in there for you to get a sense of what I was talking about.  I have put in a few references as well.

Click here to download:

Blog_Copy_of_PF_Webb_MGS_Presentation.ppt (394 KB)

(download)

Click here to download:

Blog_Copy_of_PF_Webb_MGS_Presentation.ppt (394 KB)

The date that the presentation was delivered on was 30^th March 2010.  This was the day after the Chancellor’s debate on Channel 4, so the talk of ‘inefficiencies’ was at the forefront of my mind as I put the finishing touches to the presentation.   It was also before the party leader’s debates, so there was something of an assumption that the Conservatives would be forming the next government.  I had thought it likely that Jeremy Hunt would be our next Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport – now people are even questioning his election prospects (albeit the New Statesman http://tinyurl.com/2gxkm5v )

[Instructions for downloading.  Most of the content is in the notes, rather than the slides. Click where is says 'Download' underneath the presentation then save it on to your computer.  Then open the saved file using PowerPoint.  The images are all low resolution so it will not take long] 

Blogging about blogging is probably the worst thing to do when starting a blog, but here it goes anyway.

I am in the fortunate position to work across the country with a whole variety of different museums, plus some of the regional and national bodies.  Working with such a large number of people I do come across some really inspiring people and institutions, and also some pretty serious problems.  Chatting with the people who work in museums can lead to thoughts and considerations that are worth sharing and having other people comment on, and this blog is the place for that.

A few caveats before we really get going:

1.       I do respect confidentiality.  Where a museum or person is named, the information is in the public domain or I have permission.  From time to time I will refer to ‘a museum’ where I have to respect confidentiality.

2.       This is not a series of academically rigorous articles.  It is a blog, and I know the difference.  I can (and do) write and present researched materials, but do not necessarily expect it here.

3.       I am often wrong.  I know this.  Some of the thoughts I put down here may be half-baked and I really do welcome your criticism and comments.  Between us we might come up with something really worthwhile.  I have no intention of moderating comments so long as they are relevant and not abusive.  But I may nip things in the bud before Godwin’s Law starts to come into effect.

4.       I will, on occasion, say something really useful.