Collections and Research

Submitted by Professor Keith S. Thomson, Oxford University Museum, on behalf of the Working Party, May 15, 2001.

Introduction
Information and Context: The Importance of Collections
Problems and Barriers
Planning for the Future
People
Abbreviations
References

Introduction

The collections of the nation form an array of cultural treasures of matchless quantity and quality, many of world-wide scope and importance, others of equal significance in a local and regional context. They represent the results of centuries of collecting at home and around the world and include an almost uncountable range of subjects from fine art to archaeology, world-wide anthropology to English domestic life, maritime history to tropical biodiversity, agriculture to industry, recreation and work, war and peace. They are as ancient as a stone-age tool or a 4 billion-year old rock, and as modern as tomorrow's newspaper.

There seem to be no accurate data for the number of objects currently held in the nation's museums. Present "mapping" projects may rectify this problem on a coarse collection by collection scale, but the current state of knowledge is inadequate for rational planning of resource utilisation nationally, regionally, and locally (see also North West Federation of Museums and Galleries, 1998).

In the absence of hard data, it seems reasonable to assume that the total numbers of objects held in collections must be in the region of one billion. The National Museums (defined as being funded centrally by DCMS) hold an unknown proportion - but probably well less than half - of these (principally in the two largest museums - the British Museum and the Natural History Museum). The majority of objects are held in some 2,000 - 2,500 "regional" institutions (including some in the capital city) that are almost as diverse as the objects themselves (see working party report on Markets and Users).

Evidence indicates that in many collections the number of objects has increased greatly since the 1960's, but that the rate of growth has also declined in recent years. For example, a case study of the Nottingham City Museums (Babbidge, 2001) shows accession rates of from 350 to 1,000 objects per year for the first half of the twentieth century, rising to over 3,000 per year in 1986, and falling again to some 200 per year by 1998 (among the driving factors were the creation of five new museums, one of which has since closed.)

Access to collections also increased greatly over the past 30 years, in terms of numbers of both public visitors/users and scholarly users, although the former has reached a plateau and may even be in decline (Middleton, 1998) due to competition with other elements of the "entertainment industry" especially the creation of new science centres, (Babbidge, 2001).

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Information and Context: The Importance of Collections

Every object in a collection can be read as if it were a document - because each is full of information and meaning. Contrary to uninformed public opinion, however, the material objects of culture and nature, art and artifice, so carefully collected in our museums, do not simply represent a series of static, fixed points in our culture, as if they were merely grave-markers in our history. Rather, they are constantly open to interpretation and re-interpretation, whether by scholar or by the metaphorical person-on-the-street. In this sense, therefore, museum collections not only preserve and enshrine the past, they play a major role in creating the present and the future. The story told by a World War I rifle from Mons or Ypres is not just a documentary reminder of long-ago horror and sacrifice, but a cautionary tale for the future. Similarly, today we see that weapon differently from the way museum visitors and scholars saw it 20 or 50 years ago, or from the ways it will be seen in the future.

The preceding statements do not signify that all value and meaning is relative but, nonetheless, contex t is essential. Context can be considered in two ways. The meaning that can be read from, and into, an object is not complete without a full record and consideration of the object's context. Each object requires a provenance, a full contextual history: where it came from, when, how, by whom, what it has been used for; its history of ownership and use; and also when it has been published on, when and where exhibited, etc. Without such an information base the usefulness of the object is limited. Museums are becoming ever more unwilling to accept objects without this full set of contextual information but older collections contain many objects accompanied by incomplete information, partly because standards have changed, partly because older collectors were more careless about data, often because essential data have become lost.

The second, broader, sense of context concerns the circumstances in which the object is now held and used. Two similar objects held in two different collections (for example, two paintings by LS Lowry, one in London, one in a northern industrial city) have a great deal in common, but also may acquire additional, different values, meanings and uses in their different contexts. Therefore each is subject to, and part of, a different mode of strategic planning. This must be borne in mind when we consider the rationalisation of collections and transfers among collections.

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Problems and Barriers

For all the glories of our collections, there are some serious problems, with signs of worse to come. If all these collections are to be cared for properly and used to their full potential, and if collections are to continue to grow in pace with the changes in the cultures they represent, they need very serious attention.

Declining resources

In his recent review of UK museums, Babbidge (2001) pointed to a reduction in core expenditures for UK museums of 12.5% (in real terms) between 1994/95 and 1998/99.

In the area of collections and research, the study group reported that most if not all institutions feel the need for more support for the basic housing and care of collections, for routine technical assistance, for specialist conservation, for extra space (buildings) to cope with future collection growth, for new ways of involving audiences with the collections, and for developing specialist skills. Part of this shortfall is due to the growth of collections exceeding growth of resources; part is due to increasingly demanding standards of care and conservation of objects; part is due simply to the declining level of support from parent bodies. Perhaps the most frustrating difficult arises from the competition that the collections sector within a given museum "enjoys" with respect to other institutional priorities. In every museum there is a strong, new (and wholly admirable) emphasis on access and interpretation. Every kind of public access counts in new ways towards the performance criteria by which a museum is judged and funded.

Lacking the appropriate additional funds to take on new levels of this activity, museums have little choice but selectively to divert scarce resources to those areas and away from core collection issues. This is scarcely viable as a short-term strategy; as a long-term institutional policy it is disastrous.

Among other consequences, lack of resources devoted to collection management and care leads directly to a reduction of our understanding of our own collection resources. In-house experience is reduced, leading to reduction of in-house expertise as staff have less and less time to devote to the fine-scale collections issues. Management is reduced to a least common denominator of housekeeping. In such a world there is no capacity for innovation, while the world is rapidly changing around us in ways that demand more of us.

Burden of growth

Perhaps the most difficult set of problems facing collections concerns their present size and future growth. Because collections are a direct reflection of, and active participant in, our changing culture, it is essential that objects constantly be added to our collections. But obviously, given present difficulties with respect to resources, collection growth is very much a two-edged sword.

Past growth of collections is considered by many to have been a major factor in creating a present or future burden for many institutions. This is partly due to external funding difficulties (as the funding streams from parent bodies have failed to keep up with the costs of operation) and partly due to the inability of museums to develop new funding streams based on their collections. However, there is a widespread view that many of the problems of regional collections stem from the costs (in money, valuable space, time, and commitment) of caring for collections that are no longer, or have never been, widely used. Whether this is a correct view remains to be discovered, but it is a question that cannot be ignored and requires serious study. If it is correct, the present situation has presumably resulted from at last four factors.

Changing fashions: as fashions and interests change, once-valued objects are less valued, or are needed in fewer number. For example, as bird egg collecting is no longer a popular hobby (in fact is now illegal), the need for large numbers of museums to maintain comprehensive egg collections might be considered to be diminished. On the other hand, they are still needed for identification and are still a resource for research purposes.

Enhanced access to information . A hundred years ago, a principal role of museums was to hold and display objects that the public would not otherwise have access to. Travel was expensive and so were finely illustrated (in colour) books; now they are cheap. The media, the World Wide Web and the Internet now make a huge range of information freely and instantly accessible. This has produced a revolution in the area of "reference collections". To take the birds' eggs example, a synoptic collection of images of British birds' eggs on one web-site could serve a large proportion of the common needs for access for identification. A visit to a major regional or national centre could serve the remaining need.

At the same time, however, the success of museum programmes and access to so much information by so many people has, in some cases, in fact increased the demand for reference material of real objects, ready to hand.

Basic Quality. The objects concerned may be of low usefulness due to factors such as: low inherent quality, damage, incompleteness, or lack of contextual data. This is the popular view - that museums contain a great deal of rubbish. On the other hand, what is rubbish to one person may be a treasure to another.

Institutional mission. Many museums have, over the years, accepted large numbers of objects indiscriminately (perhaps even to please a donor or supporter). All too often, in our drive to be able to measure "outputs" the number of objects in a collection has counted for more than a hard-eyed view of their value. In other cases, institutional properties have shifted but the collections have not been revised correspondingly.

All these arguments have force, but there are few hard data. However, in one area the relationship between collection growth and policy is evident. In archaeology, regional museums are obliged to accept and care for all objects brought to light during excavations. This imperative creates a huge burden on institutions in that it forces totally unselective acquisitions and the numbers of objects involved is very large. This brings us to the next subject.

Burden of responsibility

Museums have a huge responsibility simply as the repository for objects of the national and international heritage. This is an unglamorous and under-supported role, but it is also not strategically defined, especially at the regional and local level. Individual institutions create their own collection development plans without relation to overarching strategies or priorities - because these have never been articulated at the appropriate level. The result is a mosaic of collections with many overlaps and redundancies and, probably, not a few gaps - all created through the role of museums as repositories.

Parallel with the growth of the number of institutions in the past 30 years, there has been an increase in the number of (usually smaller) institutions failing, with the result that their collections potentially become orphaned. Between 1960 and 1990, 117 new local authority museums were founded in the UK and 39 closed. (Middleton, 1998; Babbidge, 2001; working party report on Markets and Users). Many of these failures stemmed from over-optimistic expansion in the 1960-1980 period (Middleton, 1998). A new round of failures seems inevitable given the competition created by the founding of numerous Lottery-funded millennial projects (Babbidge, 2001).

Universities and colleges are another source of orphaned collections (usually departmental collections) that are no longer actively used in teaching or research and for which staff resources are no longer available. In the sciences especially, research and teaching modes have shifted from the material and macroscopic to the theoretical and microscopic (in the natural sciences, for example, from anatomy to DNA). All this places a huge burden on established (but already over-stretched) institutions to assume responsibility for the orphaned collections.

A third area of responsibility concerns technical expertise. With declining budgets for collections care, and increasing standards, many museums (especially the smaller ones) find they can no longer employ an appropriate number of technical staff in the collections area. Middleton (1998) found that 60-80% of museums were not competitive in terms of quality and effectiveness of programmes and staff. This creates a burden of responsibility for the larger museums with more technical staff to assist - a role that these museums would be better able to assume if they were not themselves under-resourced.

Access

Access to the information contained in our collections is naturally thought of in real terms - the essence of a museum is one-to-one contact between the person and the object. However, the collections of most institutions are too large for this to be practical. 95% or more of objects in most collections are held in store. This fact is often difficult for the public to understand. However, large numbers of the objects in store are not of display quality, and indeed were not collected in order to be put on display but for other reasons, for which multiples of objects are needed. For example, 20 pieces of broken pottery may contain as much information as one perfect pot. One or two Acheulean hand tools may suffice for most display purposes, but a series of 100 such tools will allow a scholar to say something of the manner of their making and their use. One Durer etching may be a work of art, 20 copies of the same etching will tell a whole story about the artist, the stages of the process, and the subsequent history of the etching plate.

There are, of course, opportunities as well as problems here. The reserve collections of non-display objects contain large numbers of objects that are potentially useful in educational programming, especially if museums accept the potential for some objects to be used to destruction. Further, if the public could be given greater access to these reserve/study collections they would understand more about the role and uses of museums. In some cases, access to reserve collections can be provided through "open storage" but this is not an option for the bulk of objects that are too small, fragile, valuable, or (in a public sense) too arcane or simply uninteresting.

Another problem with respect to access is created in display policies. The current trend towards display of objects in isolation or in small groups, rather than the Victorian-Edwardian cluttered synoptic displays, in one sense makes any single object more accessible to the public visitor, but the inevitable result is that fewer and fewer objects are on view. It might be argued that for some visitors the purely aesthetic experience may be enhanced by this new practice, but inevitably each visitor sees less of the collections. And the kind of visitor we otherwise want to encourage - the visitor wishing to make comparisons (for example of the evolution of English chinaware from the nineteenth century, or the plumage variations among juveniles and males/females of gulls) in the interest of self-study- is poorly served. As number of objects on view declines, the role of the museum display as a guide and source for the basic process of study and identification is lost. This may result both in poor visitor satisfaction and, eventually, an increased and inefficient demand on staff time for access to the reserve collections.

Research

One of the most important uses of collections is in study and research, whether in scholarly work driving forward our intellectual understanding on an international scale and resulting in publications in the research journals and books, or in informed, self-directed enquiry by non-professional experts and enthusiasts. In addition to contributing to the sum of our knowledge and interpretation of culture, science, and technology, every kind of serious study of the collections reinforces all the other roles of the institution and creating a better-informed, better-educated, public.

Such study requires a different kind of access to the collections than is made available to the normal "public" visitor, and most often requires access to the reserve collections. Such visits typically extend for hours, days, and even weeks and may be unusually demanding in staff time. Yet, such study is an integral part in the training and encouragement of the next generation of museum professionals and the development of a pool of expertise in the general community.

While archives, libraries, and the university museums typically keep accurate figures on the numbers of research/study visitors and the numbers of publications resulting from study of their collections, such data are less frequently and less comprehensively assembled by many local authority museums. Planning for research use often takes second place to planning for public use. MLAs available for the care and encouragement of study visitors often take second place to funding for more "public" programming. The result is that study and research is given lesser consideration (or left out entirely) in institutional strategic planning.

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Planning for the Future

Given these problems, it seems clear that while extra resources are needed, so are changes in the ways we think about our collections. Above all, there is a need for strategic planning at the local, regional, and national levels. Some difficult strategic choices will have to be made in order to get maximum value out of available resources. Some of the (intersecting and overlapping) issues that have been highlighted in committee discussion include:

• Rationalisation of collections, within and among institutions (including selective downsizing of existing collections),
• Sharing of facilities,
• Formal and informal clustering of institutions on the basis of subject areas,
• Finding new and more imaginative uses of collections,
• Encouraging greater scholarly use and self-directed study of collections,
• Improvement of exchange of information and expertise among institutions
• Use of virtual, in addition to real, access.

The following discussion is organised around two main themes: Information and Strategies.

Information

Strategic planing is only possible on the basis of information. Strategic planning for any single institution must depend in great part on a strategic plan for the whole. The digital age makes that possible. As noted in the introduction, the nation's collections form an extraordinary resource but the worth of that resource cannot be realised unless we actually know what it is! If data from all significant collections were to become available in on-line searchable form, one could easily create tallies and analyses of any subject. Only by being able easily to gain access to information on the total regional and national stock of materials in a particular subject will it be feasible to make informed decisions about single objects or whole subject fields - for example, the nation's resources in dinosaur palaeontology or the lace making industry in the East Midlands. (A case of good practice here, albeit made easier by a very small data base, is the National Banner Survey of the National Museum of Labour History.) The Scottish Executive has launched this kind of strategic thinking for Scottish collections (Scottish Museums Council, 1999).

As collections represent actual or potential information, institutions must do their utmost to maximise the extraction of information from objects and to make that information available. As collections represent a resource to be managed, institutions must use every scrap of information about their collections and the regional and national context, in order to plan strategically for the future. Basic inventories are an essential first step in the process of making strategic decisions about resources. No strategic thinking about the future of collections and research is possible without complete information that can be compared and shared among institutions. A prime priority for every museum, therefore, is to put as much information about its collections as possible into accessible, digital, form. Such a database is an essential tool for collection management.

Information begins with unit-by-unit cataloguing. Different patterns of data recording are appropriate for given kinds of object and given kinds of collections. In most areas, each object is accessioned and catalogued individually. The extreme example of this would be fine art. In others, the unit is a "lot" or much larger "collection". The extreme example here would be entomology where the lowest common denominator of data might be a collection representing some hundreds or even thousands of individual insects of many different kinds.

Many museums are already devoting considerable resources to producing both information about displays and their basic catalogue information in digital form. However, the greatest value of such efforts comes when the results are published in the form of fully searchable Web-based data bases (and where appropriate and feasible) including images of the object in question (see for example, Oxford University Museum of Natural History (2001), for searchable natural history data bases).

It will not suffice simply to take the old paper records from ledgers and file cards and simply transcribe the information to digital form. Specimen identification, location within collection, condition, and all details of provenance must be properly verified and updated. Nothing could be worse than putting out to a wide audience poor quality, even downright incorrect, information. This task is both expensive and time-consuming and will require assistance from central government sources (Designation Challenge Funds are already being used for this purposes by some institutions.)

(It is not necessary that these databases by created within some single national model or system. New and better search engines by which different databases can readily be searched are being developed all the time.)

While a detailed inventory may be technically time-consuming and require specialist expertise, a second area where new kinds of information are essential is even more difficult to accomplish. This is the matter of quantity and quality. An inevitable requirement for strategic thinking about an object or collection is the answer to the question: " How important is it in its own right?" Putting it more bluntly: "what are the costs and benefits of retaining such an object or collection?"

If it is correct that institutions are weighed down with the burden of maintaining larger collections than their resources can afford to support, it is logical to expect that they should assess the absolute quality of the collections (including quality and accessibility of associated documentation). It would be necessary to assess not only the absolute quality of the object or collection of objects, but also their value to the particular institutional mission. This may be easier in theory than practice, if only because quality is also a relative matter. One person's trash might be someone else's treasure (see, rationalisation, below). Nonetheless, there remains a strong suspicion that, if hard decisions were forced, some significant proportion of existing collections would turn out to be redundant.

Strategies

Babbidge (2001) asked: "how should local authorities rationalise their collections and improve the efficiency of their museum resources?" This is a question that is being asked throughout the entire museum sector (for example in Norfolk's Best Value Review, (Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service, 2001a)). Strategic thinking is needed at every level: institutional, regional, national. But it must be based on more information than is contained in an inventory and condition report. It must also be directed to the difficult questions:

• What is the value of each object/collection to the mission of the institution?
• What is their relation to collections in other institutions?
• What contribution do they make to the sum of regional, national and even international resources in the given subject?
• What are the regional and national strategies in each area?

Armed with detailed answers to these questions, a museum could make rational decisions as to whether to continue to collect in each area, to hold the collections at current status, or to reduce holdings in preference to building in other areas.

Collections therefore also need a hard-headed review in terms of re-defining the missions and the contexts in which collections are held and used (beyond the present requirements of the Registration scheme). This information should be developed first by each institution in the context of a proper business plan in which the potential of individual collections is assessed in terms of what they can deliver for the region and the nation as well as for the mission of the home institution. (In any given subject, one could make an argument against building and holding numbers of collections that duplicate each other regionally or nationally, but equally there will be cases where such duplication is functionally important and defensible.)

Rationalisation of collections

Given access to information, collections can be developed more efficiently. In the processes of increasing efficiency, and in order to develop new initiatives, including new collecting, existing collections must change in one or more of the following ways:

• rationalisation of collections in a regional or national context;
• increased dispersal (exchange, gift) of materials to other collections;
• more imaginative loan systems;
• increased outright disposal;
• development of shared, common, facilities.

Rationalisation of collections will be essential for the future health of the industry. At a simple level, this could be developed as an extension of the present useful process of "clustering" smaller museums for educational programming purposes (see for example, the North West Museums Service Cluster Programme, (North West Museums Service, 2001)). In collection management, institutions could be grouped together according to common themes and interests so as to develop a coherent, common strategy, while maintaining local independence.

A case of good practice involving more drastic rationalisation concerns the nation's maritime museums. Faced with the ineluctable problem that present collection responsibilities and the potential for future collection growth easily outstrip present and future resources, both of money and space, the major maritime collections have embarked upon a programme of rationalisation of collections. Among the results of this United Kingdom Maritime Collections Strategy (2001, no published report; website in preparation) is expected to be the distribution of collections from the National Maritime Museum to regional centres, each specialising in some aspect of maritime history and life. Each regional centre will thereby be strengthened and the burden of responsibility now falling heavily on the National Maritime Museum will be shared. In principle each institutions will gain. But in principle each institution in such a rationalisation scheme only gains by simultaneously giving something up.

A decade ago, the Government, through HEFCE, instituted a programme of rationalisation of university collections in the Earth Sciences that resulted in the wholesale redistribution of collections to a small number of centres of excellence. This has been highly successful in bringing collections together in groups of sufficient size for efficient care and management. It has also highlighted the needs of many small geological collections that were not moved, but have subsequently suffered from lack of resources, space and dedicated staff (see preceding discussion of orphaned collections).

These are strong models for other museums to follow, although they may not be immediately applicable across the whole museum sector for at least two reasons: (1) most museums have much broader ranges of collections and (2) in many areas, there as yet exists no data base from which to work, comparable to the data base for maritime or geology collections.

Dispersal and exchange of collections , after careful strategic planning, will result in stronger and more focused collections for any participating museum. They could also produce new centres of collection strength and, by virtue of the size of the institutions so strengthened, greater staff expertise and a greater capacity to assist smaller museum. The end result would be significant improvement in the quality of collection-related functions across the industry.

Dispersal of collections does not, however, wholly solve the problem that most museums have in caring for collections on the basis of too small a resource base unless the dispersed collections, in their new context, significantly increase revenue streams (as opposed to one-time capital investment) in the receiving institution, or significantly reduce levels of expenditures in the giving donor institutions. Otherwise, the problem will have migrated with the objects.

Disposal is an option when a careful review shows that collections are not only surplus to the requirement of the home institution but are also redundant regionally and nationally. Traditionally, disposal (de-accessioning) of collections has been anathema to professional museum community. For example, the Museums Association is currently circulating for comment a draft Code of Ethics that contains a strong presumption - amounting to a preclusion - against de-accessioning: "Those who work for or govern museums should ensure that they.... Presume against the disposal of any items from the permanent, public collections out of the public domain. Maintain public confidence in museums by not selling items from a permanent collection, nor otherwise transferring them out of the public domain." (Museums Association, 2001).

However, in recent years, faced with the realities of resource limitation, the negative attitude of many institutions towards de-accessioning has necessarily softened. It now seems equally responsible and worthy of public confidence, to dispose of collections if the overall efficiency of the institution is improved without loss of content value. It seems highly probable that much more disposal will occur in the future. Means should therefore be established both to facilitate this process and also safeguard it. This is an area where museums must assist each other, particularly the bigger museums (with the greater resources) might assist the smaller ones, and the national museums might assist all the regional ones.

It has to be pointed out, however, that disposal is not a universal panacea for the problems of collection resources. Disposal of a few small objects will not change the big picture. The cost of time needed properly to assess collections for disposal and to handle all the logistical (including legal) issues might easily exceed any benefit in funds or space.

Loans . Creative programmes for the loan of objects - especially when this finds uses for the objects outside of the normal museum context (corporations, for example)- can do much to increase access to collections and to create a broader public and greater goodwill for an institution. The scale of the process and the fact that loans make most sense when the object concerned is of high display quality in the first place, will not necessarily make a dent in the collection management problems of most museums in the short-term, but resources spent in developing such programmes may be recouped in the long-term in the form of greater levels of corporate sponsorship and philanthropy.

Shared facilities . As space for collections is a major issue in many museums, considerations of economy of scale may dictate the development of shared regional stores (once the critical planning has been done and only for those materials worth keeping). Such regional facilities can also be developed as "open access" institutions but it is necessary to think carefully and strategically about the role of such "un-interpreted" spaces versus closed spaces and in relation to the "open" access of the parent museums. Staff costs increase dramatically in storage facilities with open public access, and there is no point in developing new public attractions that will compete with the existing ones for an already declining market of visitors.

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People

Finally, it is not possible to consider collections and research without paying a great deal of attention to people. The largest single item in the budget of any museum is salaries. Declining institutional budgets inevitably translate into declining resources for collections, affecting both their care and their use. Low salaries make it difficult for museums to recruit skilled staff. In times of diminishing staff resources, we must develop strategic plans for the sharing of resources such as conservation staff and laboratories and for training staff in specialist skills. We must creating registers of people with specialist skills, so as to make more use of the non-museum expert/enthusiast.

Developing a wider base of users who come to the collections for serious study, whether amateur or professional, is essential for the long-term health (political as well as intellectual) of the heritage industry. We must find ways to serve existing users better and to recruit new cohorts of users. It would be invaluable to develop user skills, so as to encourage study/research use at all levels. This is yet another role where the larger museums can help smaller ones. One strategy would be the development of new on-site lectures and courses, more written materials, and innovative web-based information packs to assist people in learning how to use collection resources. Valuable models exist in the information available for researching genealogies in the nation's archives (for example, the Finding Aids available from the Public Record Office (Public Record Office, 2001)). Another strategy is to develop specialist Collections Study Centres (for example, the Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service's centres at Shirehall and Carrow House, Norwich and the Norfolk Rural Life Museum (Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service, 2001b).

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Abbreviations

DCMS Department for Culture, Media and Sport

HEFCE Higher Education Funding Council for England

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References

Babbidge, A. (2001), 'UK Museums: Safe and Sound?', Cultural Trends 37. London: Policy Studies Institute.

Middleton, V.T.C. (1998), New visions for museums in the 21 ^st century, London: Association of Independent Museums.

Museums Association (2001), Draft Code of Ethics, London: Museums Association.

National Maritime Museum (2001), UK maritime collections strategy, Internet site in preparation http://www.nmm.ac.uk/ukmcs .

Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service (2001a), Best Value Review, Norwich: Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service.

Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service (2001b), Norfolk Museums Service, Internet http://www.norfolk.gov.uk//Defaultframe1.htm .

North West Federation of Museums and Galleries (1998), The collected collections: A Collections Survey for the North West Federation of Museums and Art Galleries [reference from website?]

North West Museums Service (2001), Learning for life news: Cluster project update, Internet http://www.nwmuseums.co.uk/html%20files/home.htm

Oxford University Museum of Natural History (2001), Collections online, Internet http://www.oum.ox.ac.uk/collson.htm .

Public Record Office (2001), Records information leaflets, Internet http://www.pro.gov.uk/research/leaflets/ .

Scottish Museums Council (1999) A National strategy for Scotland's Museums. Edinburgh: Scottish Museums Council.

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