University Museums in Scotland - Conference 2011
UNIVERSITIES AND MUSEUMS: NEW RULES OF ENGAGEMENT?
Review by Kate Arnold Foster (MERL, University of Reading)
Reflecting on the UMIS conference from the perspective of university museums south of the border, it is hard not to feel both impressed and even a little envious of the day's proceedings. The contributions were marked by a unity of purpose and shared resilience in facing the almost certain challenges of funding shortfalls to come and further changes in Scottish higher education. More importantly perhaps, Scottish university museums appear not simply to be contemplating the need to reshape themselves in response to new strategic imperatives; most (if not all, it seems) can already point to the kind of transformation that many museums outside the HE community are still struggling to achieve. Equally, the strength of UMIS as an effective community of practitioners was also tangible (something that larger networks often lack); a function of its size perhaps, but also of a shared understanding of the need to reassert the unique and distinctive contribution they can make, particularly to higher education.
Anyone who has witnessed at close quarters or worked in university museums in recent decades will appreciate the extraordinary transformation of the sector. The conference themes alone are evidence of the maturity and professionalism that has been achieved in a short time, with university museums having emerged (or re-emerged) as a distinctive and respected part of the wider museums community. We no longer hold conferences dominated by the notion of university museums as a threatened species, mourning the loss and destruction of orphan collections and the threat of cuts and departmental closures; instead, as the UMIS conference reminded me, Scottish university museums are promoting innovative sector-leading work of a kind that challenges our peers in all parts of the museums' community.
Though this sense of confidence was inspiring, my impression was that the university museums in Scotland have already had to make difficult decisions and are bracing themselves for more. But they have also learnt lessons, particularly about the importance of adaptability and about their capacity to renew and regenerate their organisations.
Innovative approaches to deepening engagement with university collections was among the strongest themes of the day. The ambitious discourse envisioned by Peter Bjerregard around his design experiment for object installations and his concept of the university museum as a 'machine for knowledge in the making' made an elegant point about the immense and possibly unique opportunities they offer for bringing together ideas, questions and knowledge about the interpretation of our past through the materiality of collections. Set against Ellen MacAdam's honest and thoughtful reflections on the loss of research-focused curation in local authority museums and many non university museums, we were reminded of the huge privileges that university museums can still offer in nurturing the opportunity to forefront research and knowledge transfer as the focus of much of our activity. Eleanor Smith's wonderful digital pantograph was another illustration of the kind of innovation that university museums can foster, with what seemed to be the potential to transform ways in which a variety of objects could be examined to illicit new knowledge and information.
Although in part brought about by challenging circumstances with repercussions for both infrastructure and services, the contributions from David Gaimster and Neil Curtis provided fascinating insights into new developments for museums at the Universities of Aberdeen and Glasgow, including the Kelvin Hall partnership with Glasgow Life and the involvement of museums in the 'North' research pathway at Aberdeen. They were able to speak with remarkable optimism about the future and even a touch of healthy rivalry; while cuts and uncertainty about the external funding context had forced both services to revise and refocus their operations and objectives, it was clear that these changes had been achieved with strengthened support from their institutions at the highest level.
The obvious lesson is that the reinvigoration of university museums must rely heavily on their capacity to adapt and align themselves responsively to their parent universities, while promoting excellence through innovation and best practice. Likewise, Ann Gunn explained how the reconfiguration of the museums and collections at St Andrew's had supported their teaching programmes had helped ensure their resilience. Alison Turnbull's challenge to respond to the MGS consultation on a National Museum Strategy for Scotland is, of course, a timely one at a moment when Scottish University Museums are reaffirming so effectively their claim to position themselves in a leading role in the wider cultural sector.
But perhaps for me the most outstanding event of the conference was the launch of the UMIS 'Revealing the Hidden Collections' on line search portal, led by Neil Curtis and his colleagues at Aberdeen. This is a remarkable and major achievement by any standards and one that deserves widespread recognition. It is the kind of project that will rightly inspire the whole museums' sector for its realisation as a joint endeavour - few museum networks could hope to deliver anything similar, while almost anyone working in museums will immediately appreciate its significance and value - but also for highlighting the extraordinary quality and breadth of Scottish University museums.
