An Unfortunate Truth for Museums
The Collections Trust is currently involved in an AHRC/EPSRC Science and Heritage Programme project called EGOR. ‘EGOR’ stands for Environmental Guidelines: Opportunities and Risks, and the aim of the project is to re-assess the environmental impact of the various standards frameworks used by museums, archives and libraries.
While the recent Museums Association enquiry into sustainability for museums was a bit all over the place, EGOR is defined much more tightly around the technologies and protocols we use to modulate risks to collections and buildings presented by environmental factors such as heat, light, ventilation and pollutants.
The project is led by Nancy Bell of the National Archive’s Collections Care Department, and is seeking to address some of the fundamental questions including:
- How valid is the science underpinning current ‘best practice’ models?
- Are our current tolerances for environmental control best-suited to the needs of the collections?
- What are the metrics we need in order to map the impact of varying standards?
- Are passive technologies viable alternative for active Environmental controls?
This question about the reality of our beliefs about Environmental control in cultural organisations has been running for some time now. Following the dramatic increases in fuel prices of the past 2-3 years and broader developments in the Conservation and Climate Change communities, there is an increasing tendency to look on active Collections Management as a significant overhead for museums. For some larger Hub and National Museums, the costs of heat and light are accounting for almost 40% of their operational overhead.
Collections Management has always been about the active management of a careful equilibrium between preservation, use and cost. Tweaking one variable has a profound effect on the others. The reality for museums is that the demand for their services has increased, and their operating budgets are in decline. This can only result in a gradual diminution first of Collections Care and ultimately of collecting itself.
The unfortunate truth, then, is that the cultural community may need to adjust its view of what constitutes the responsible long-term management of the collections in our care.
