Work
Standards and publications
The Collections Trust developed the SPECTRUM Standard – the Museum Collections Management Standard – in 1994. [2] The standard details how to manage collections and what to do with artefacts at each stage of their lifecycle in a collection. The Standard is now in its fifth edition and is used by the majority of museums. It has been translated into several languages including Dutch and Flemish.
The organisation also produces collections management best practice guides and benchmarking tools. It has particular expertise in digital collections management and the use of new technology for museums, such as 3D imaging. Many of its resources are freely available on its website. [2]
Events
The Collections Trust hosts a number of practical workshops and seminars for collections management professionals and an annual conference. At this conference the Collections Trust's Awards are presented. [3] Previous award winners include:
2012
2013
2014
Funded projects
The Collections Trust works on many projects that are funded by Arts Council England and by the European Commission. It is currently managing 20m Euros worth of EC projects, including Athena Plus, [8] Digital Cultural Heritage Roadmap for Preservation (DCH-RP)], [9] EEXCESS, [10] EU Collections Competencies Project (EUColComp)], [11] Europeana Food and Drink [12] and Europeana Inside. [13] The Collections Trust leads the UK's involvement in the Europeana project.
Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
The Burrell Collection is a museum in Glasgow, Scotland, managed by Glasgow Museums. It houses the art collection of Sir William Burrell and Constance, Lady Burrell. The museum opened in 1983 and reopened on 29 March 2022 following a major refurbishment. It was announced as the winner of the Art Fund Museum of the Year in July 2023. It is the only non-national museum to be the outright winner twice.
Art Fund is an independent membership-based British charity, which raises funds to aid the acquisition of artworks for the nation. It gives grants and acts as a channel for many gifts and bequests, as well as lobbying on behalf of museums and galleries and their users. It relies on members' subscriptions and public donations for funds and does not receive funding from the government or the National Lottery.
The Design Museum in Kensington, London exhibits product, industrial, graphic, fashion, and architectural design. In 2018, the museum won the European Museum of the Year Award. The museum operates as a registered charity, and all funds generated by ticket sales aid the museum in curating new exhibitions.
Culture24, originally the 24 Hour Museum, is a British charity which publishes websites, Culture24, Museum Crush and Show Me, about visual culture and heritage in the United Kingdom, as well as supplying data and support services to other cultural websites including Engaging Places.
The Museums Association (MA) is a professional membership organisation based in London for museum, gallery and heritage professionals and organisations of the United Kingdom. It also offers international membership.
The Media Development Authority was a statutory board of the Singapore Government, under the Ministry of Communications and Information (MCI).
Sheffield, England, has a large population of amateur, working and professional visual artists and artworks.
Europeana is a web portal created by the European Union containing digitised cultural heritage collections of more than 3,000 institutions across Europe. It includes records of over 50 million cultural and scientific artefacts, brought together on a single platform and presented in a variety of ways relevant to modern users. The prototype for Europeana was the European Digital Library Network (EDLnet), launched in 2008.
The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) is an open access digital archive for archaeological research outputs. It is located in The King's Manor, at the University of York. Originally intended to curate digital outputs from archaeological researchers based in the UK's Higher Education sector, the ADS also holds archive material created under the auspices of national and local government as well as in the commercial archaeology sector. The ADS carries out research, most of which focuses on resource discovery, cross-searching and interoperability with other relevant archives in the UK, Europe and the United States of America.
Wolfgang "Chris" Wild is a curator, writer, speaker and creator of the history brand Retronaut.
The Australian Museums and Galleries Association (AMaGA), formerly Museums Galleries Australia and Museums Australia, is the national professional organisation and peak council for museums and public art galleries in Australia. It advocates for the sector and provides a range of professional services to its members at a national, state and interest group level.
Sir Paul Martin Ruddock, is a British businessman, philanthropist and patron of the arts. He is a former Chairman of the Victoria & Albert Museum and Chairman of the University of Oxford Endowment.
The UK Data Service is the largest digital repository for quantitative and qualitative social science and humanities research data in the United Kingdom. The organisation is funded by the UK government through the Economic and Social Research Council and is led by the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex, in partnership with other universities.
The European Film Gateway (EFG) is a single access point to the digitized holdings of historical European film documents from numerous film archives and cinematheques, including over 600,000 individual objects from over 60 collections. The European Film Gateway gives access to images, textual materials, and moving images. The vast contents include film stills, set photos, posters, set drawings, portrait photographs, scripts, correspondences, film censorship and visa rulings, out-of-print books, film programs and reviews, as well as newsreels, documentaries, commercials, and feature films. The portal facilitates access to the archives which hold the original materials.
Yana Peel is a Russian-born Canadian executive, businesswoman, children's author and philanthropist who is currently global head of arts and culture at Chanel. She was CEO of the Serpentine Galleries from 2016 to 2019, and was previously a board member.
AthenaPlus is a CIP best practice network started in March 2013 which aims to facilitate access to networks of cultural heritage, enrich metadata, as well as improve search, retrieval and re-use of Europeana’s content by enhancing multilingual terminology management and the export/publication tool. By the end of the project, AthenaPlus will contribute more than 3.6 millions of metadata records to Europeana, from both public and private sectors, focusing mainly on museums content. In addition to enabling access to cultural heritage, AthenaPlus is also focused on creative use of content, and adapting data to users with different needs by means of tools that support the development of virtual exhibitions, tourist and didactic applications.
Lightweight Information Describing Objects (LIDO) is an XML schema for describing museum or collection objects. Memory institutions use LIDO for “exposing, sharing and connecting data on the web”. It can be applied to all kind of disciplines in cultural heritage, e.g. art, natural history, technology, etc. LIDO is a specific application of CIDOC CRM.
A Collections Management System (CMS), sometimes called a Collections Information System, is software used by the collections staff of a collecting institution or by individual private collectors and collecting hobbyists or enthusiasts. Collecting institutions are primarily museums and archives and cover a very broad range from huge, international institutions, to very small or niche-specialty institutions such as local historical museums and preservation societies. Secondarily, libraries and galleries are also collecting institutions. Collections Management Systems (CMSs) allow individuals or collecting institutions to organize, control, and manage their collections' objects by “tracking all information related to and about” those objects. In larger institutions, the CMS may be used by collections staff such as registrars, collections managers, and curators to record information such as object locations, provenance, curatorial information, conservation reports, professional appraisals, and exhibition histories. All of this recorded information is then also accessed and used by other institutional departments such as “education, membership, accounting, and administration."
KE Software is a formerly Australian-owned computer software company based in Manchester, United Kingdom, which specialises in collection management programs for museums, galleries and archives. The Axiell Group purchased the firm in 2014.
