Museum Practice. Группа авторов
Читать онлайн книгу.
funding could be allocated in a second phase to the other six hubs.
The regional museum hubs have developed business plans according to MLA guidelines. All have an obligation to increase visits, particularly from non- traditional museum users and to extend their work with schools. In other respects, the hubs pursued priorities they had identified for their region. In particular this allowed them to develop areas other than simple audience increases, including strategic reviews to identify how museums can be sustained in the future, as well as collections management and workforce development.
Regional museum hubs are the main strand of Renaissance but the program has many other elements. For example, more funding has been made available for museum development officers to support smaller museums, enabling more officers to be employed and boosting the budgets of existing services. Renaissance has also provided funding for the Museum Association’s Diversify program (encouraging minorities into museum careers) and its Effective Collections initiative; and for Subject Specialist Networks, one of the ideas in the Renaissance in the Regions report. Indeed, Renaissance has worked in partnership with virtually every museum sector initiative since 2002 and has been, with the HLF, the mainstay of museum development for nearly 10 years.
Legislation, amendments, and effects
It was inevitable that the implementation of Renaissance would depart from the Task Force’s proposals. There was no formal, forward plan for it, and Renaissance was subject to a number of factors – most importantly, the amount of funding available, government priorities, and choices made by MLA. The Renaissance Review, written seven years after the publication of the 2001 Regional Museums Task Force Report, and in anticipation of nearly £300 million having been spent on the program by 2011, tracked the program’s achievements. Regional museums had come a long way since 2001: they had a political profile; were more capable of levering in other funding, and their capacity to contribute to regional regeneration agendas was better understood and recognized. Regional museums were noticeably more confident in the management and presentation of their collections than previously. Research and evaluation had become an increasingly standard part of their work; they were increasingly modernized; have introduced greater cultural diversity; and were reaching more audiences through learning projects with children, young people, and adults. Volunteering has not only added to the value of museums, it has also enabled hubs to engage more effectively with members of the local community, as well as helping volunteers to develop their own skills and self-confidence. Beyond the hubs, the Museum Development Officer structure was regarded as achieving “real change” (RRAG 2009, 11). The Review also made recommendations for the future priorities, management, and delivery of the Renaissance.
With the abolition of MLA, Arts Council England assumed a number of MLA’s functions for museums. Following a review as to how its strategic goals could best reflect the museums and libraries sectors alongside the arts (Morris 2011), it published A Review of Research and Literature on Museums and Libraries (ACE 2011b) and a 10-year strategic framework for the sector (ACE 2011a). ACE’s principal museum responsibilities include the Renaissance in the Regions program; the regional museums’ improvement and development agenda, including the Accreditation Standard and Designation Scheme; the protection of cultural objects; export controls; tax incentives and projects relating to the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. In January 2012 it announced its funding decisions for the Renaissance major grants program, valued at £20 million a year.
Case study 3: Free admission
Free admission had been a manifesto pledge and most strongly represented New Labour’s commitment to access-for-all to culture, especially in the national museums.
Intentions
New Labour assumed that museums were “an essential platform for learning for all and lifelong learning” (HoC 2002, summary 1). Consequently, free admission, promised in both New Labour’s pre-1997 election manifesto (Labour Party 1997) and its A New Cultural Framework (DCMS 1998) was intended to broaden access by “the many not just the few” and to encourage visits by people from “hard to reach” social groups in particular.
Administrative and delivery mechanisms
New Labour’s strategy on free admission involved the trustees of government- sponsored museums, who had previously charged for entry, dropping their admission fees. In “exchange” for this, the department would increase its funding (HoC 2002, summary 4). A special VAT rebate scheme was introduced in 2001 for museums and galleries offering free access. The introduction of free admission was incremental: free admission for children was introduced in April 1999; for the over-60s in April 2000, and for everyone in December 2001. Free admission to university museums followed in August 2005.
Perceived effect
DCMS’s press releases presented free admission as a spectacular success on the basis of visit numbers at the formerly charging museums having escalated.
Alongside Lottery funding, which enabled existing museums and galleries throughout the UK to be extended and extensively refurbished, free admission contributed considerably to the increased profile of British museums: the policy itself has become iconic. For the arch spin-doctor of New Labour, Peter Mandelson, the government got off to a good start by keeping to campaign commitments and implementing quick wins, which included announcing free entry to museums.
DCMS’s reporting on free admission has, however, been opaque. It has compared visit numbers against a baseline indicative of the situation before entry charges were scrapped, but it also presented aggregated visit numbers, and converted visits into visitors. Although free admission clearly prompted millions of extra visits, by a larger percentage of the population (HoC 2002, evidence p. 33 para. 79), the department has never publicly reflected on whom was encouraged to visit, and whether or not they were its original target audience. Ministerial statements, nevertheless, implied that DCMS’s strategy was working to plan claiming that free admission has democratized the nation’s treasures making them accessible to all; that the removal of such barriers as admission charges was a clear rebuttal to those who had said that people were not interested in “serious” culture and learning. The figures were said to disprove the contention that the initiative was all about the same people visiting more often: that half of all visits were by “new visitors” – “new visitors” being defined as those who had not visited in the previous 12 months.
Yet, other reports suggested that DCMS’s target audience for free admission, originally identified as those whom the department initially classified as C2DEs (the half of the population comprising skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled manual workers, state pensioners etc., with no other earnings) did not necessarily account for the increases in visit numbers.6 Within a year of the introduction of universal free admission, it was apparent that while attendance was increasing across all social groups, the most significant rises in visit numbers were among those who had always been well represented amongst museum and gallery visitors (Martin 2002). The same kind of people were still going, and the profile of a typical population of museum visitors remained relatively stable. Indeed a government inquiry, National Museums and Galleries: Funding and Free Admission, concluded that “Emerging trends and previous research indicate that free admission on its own is unlikely to be effective in attracting significant numbers of new visitors from the widest range of socio-economic and ethnic groups” (HoC 2002, para. 60). DCMS’s 2003–2006 agreements with its sponsored museums and galleries, as well as with MLA regarding Renaissance-funded museums, required an overall increase of 8 percent between April 2003 and March 2006 by adult visitors in socioeconomic group C2DE. Each museum would undertake specific activities depending on its own circumstances. DCMS’s 2006 Annual Report declared this target as having been met. The 2007 target was to increase the number of people from priority groups (defined as those with a social disability, people from lower socioeconomic groups and ethnic minorities by 2 percent). But, its 2008 Annual Report reported slippage across arts, museums and galleries,