Samdok - Nordiska museet

connecting collecting: merritt
Somewhere between $4.5 and $6 billion dollars in
private charitable and public support is provided to US
museums each year. This charitable support, like tax exempt
status, is given with the understanding that museums
are educational organizations that operate in the
public interest. Each museum identifies in its mission
statement whom it serves and how it spends its money
delivering on this mission. A museum must constantly
prove that this mission is worthwhile and that it is effectively
fulfilling it. Neither government nor philanthropic
support is guaranteed.
The cost of caring for collections
US museums hold roughly 986 million items in the public
trust, and spend about $1 billion each year on collections
care (a little more than one dollar per object). The
museum community is making the case that this is not
enough, that it actually needs significantly more support
to fulfill these stewardship responsibilities. And there is,
certainly, documented need:
• 89 percent of US museums do not have adequate
storage facilities for all their collections
• 80 percent have no emergency preparedness
plan that covers collections or
trained staff to carry out such a plan
• 63 percent have no paid staff to perform
conservation or preservation work
• 45 percent do not have collections
management policies2 • 14 percent have no environmental controls
(Public Trust at Risk, 2005)
Collections do not generally earn their own way –
more collections do not, as a rule, bring more earned
revenue into the museum. And donated collections are
rarely accompanied by endowed support. So increased
support for collections care will have to be philanthropic
– either government or private. But by asking for more
2 Unpublished data from AAM’s Museum Assessment Program
participants.
money to care for the artistic, cultural and natural heritage
they hold in the public trust, museums open themselves
up to close scrutiny regarding how well they are
fulfilling their stewardship responsibilities. What is each
US citizen getting for his or her $3 per year?
The primary justifications that museums give for collecting,
as expressed in their mission statements, are to
preserve these resources and make them accessible to the
public. But is ‘the good’ of the public really what drives
collecting? Do museums accomplish these goals well
enough to justify the support provided by the public?
And are museums the most efficient way to fulfill these
functions?
Museums’ role as protectors
of collections
First let us examine preservation, starting with the basic
function of protecting collections from risks. This subject
is getting a lot of attention right now, both because
of recent natural disasters, and because of the appalling
statistic cited above regarding the lack of emergency preparedness
planning in US museums. Museums present
themselves as bank vaults for cultural, scientific, and
artistic resources – if the public entrusts this material
to them, they will keep it safe for them. But is there a
downside to this model? Sometimes it seems as if museums
are simply herding together important material so it
can all be threatened in one place. (An entire collection
– if not properly stored and cared for – is in danger if a
disaster occurs.) Museums may (or may not) do a good
job of mitigating the smaller, day to day and month to
month risks like fluctuations of temperature and humidity,
light, etc, but often do a bad job of contending with
rare catastrophic events that can’t be prevented and only
imperfectly mitigated.
Let’s examine this point. Museums tend to concentrate
collections, and therefore risk, a questionable
strategy in a world of increasingly common (and hard to
predict) natural and man-made disasters. A number of
museums in the United States either house the majority
of a given artist’s work, or constitute the largest single
publicly displayed collection of that person’s work. In
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