European Standards Map

United Kingdom

EMII gratefully acknowledges the help of the following people in the UK:

Louise Smith, Director, mda
Matthew Stiff, Standards Team, mda
Gordon McKenna, Standards Team, mda
Sande Nuttall, Standards Team, mda

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National Overview

The UK Museums Association has a published definition of museum:

'Museums enable people to explore collections for inspiration, learning and enjoyment. They are institutions that collect, safeguard and make accessible artefacts and specimens, which they hold in trust for society.'

The activities of UK museums are formally governed by the 1992 Museums & Galleries Act. The partner estimated that 50% (or less) of UK museums comply with the ICOM Code of Professional Ethics. It should be noted, however, that compliance is a requirement of the Registration Scheme for museums.

The body responsible for co-ordinating documentation within the UK is mda

The total number of museums in the UK is estmated at 2,500 with collections totalling an estimated 350,000,000 objects. The ratio of public museums versus private owned and run museums is estimated as 1000 to 1,500. There is no published definition of a public museum in the UK. However, mda proposes the following: (as the opposite to the AIM definition below) as:

'An institution with a board of trustees or other policy making body which are directly controlled by or the direct responsibility of any central government department or local or regional authority or similar political sub-division.'

The Association of Independent Museums [AIM] supplied the following definition for Independent museums , i.e. private museums. Independent museums must have:

'a board of trustees or other policy making body which are not directly controlled by or the direct responsibility of any central government department or local or regional authority or similar political sub-division'.

Source: Memorandum and Articles of Association, Association of Independent Museums (AIM)

Categories of Public Museums

Categories of Private Museums

Sources: For the numbers and types of museums: Resource information, and in particular the Digest of Museum Statistics (DOMUS). This is supplemented by information from the Association of Independent Museums. The number of National Museums is based on the membership of National Museum Directors Conference.

For the numbers of objects: Figures are estimated from an mda survey of 1998 that had responses from about 10% of institutions in the UK.

Employment

It is estimated that around 12,590 people are in full time (more than 35 hours per week) employment in UK museums and there is no published number for part-time paid staff. Voluntary workers are estimated at 25,205. The Museums and Galleries Commission publication 'Museums Focus' (1999) gives figures for full-time equivalent paid posts and for the number of volunteer staff. Other figures included are for temporary full-time equivalent posts (2,775) and freelancers (853) The total is estimated at 40,000.

Information Management

Percentage of cultural heritage held in Museums that is:

For documented collections, what percentage is:

(1) To national minimum standard where one exists or international alternative. (2) Catalogued beyond national minimum standard.

Partners comment: Figures based on an mda survey of about 10% of museums which indicated around 1,800 museums record object information digitally . More accurate figures should be available for Registered Museums when a recent MGC DOMUS survey is analysed.

In the UK national documentation guidelines are available: 'Museums & Galleries Commission Guidelines, Phase II'.

The principles are that a museum should know at any time exactly for what items it is legally responsible (this includes loans and deposits as well as permanent collections), and where each item is located. It is recognized that the format of such records will differ between museums, but each museum should be able to demonstrate that these broad principles are reflected in its documentation procedures.

In the UK 100% of digital collections information is held in instutional databases.

Images and Multimedia

There are no reliable figures for all museums in the UK to determine how many have published CD-ROMS. However the mda survey in 1998 (10% of all museums) found that at the time about 3% museums had published CD-ROMs. The same survey showed that around 30% of museums had interactive gallery systems.

Percentage of museums with digital images of all or part of their collections:

The UK was not able to answer for what purpose digital images were produced. The categories included CD-ROM publishing, Collections Mangement, Education and Web publishing.

Museums and the Internet

It is estimated that around 500 museums have Intenet access for Web browsing and 500 have email. As before, these figures are extrapolated from an mda survey with a 10% response rate. Looking at the entries in the UK Virtual Libraries Museum Page around 400 have a Web site. Around 20 museums have collections database on-line. It is not known how many museums plan to have collections databases on-line by December 2000 or 2002. Of the total number of web sites around 200 are brochureware only. It is not clear what the content of the remaining 200 is.

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International, National and Regional Initiatives

We asked partners to describe current or recently completed international initiativees to facilitate remote access to cultual hertiage information. These can include participation in professional working groups and other EC funded projects.

• Initiative details

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Procedural Standards

SPECTRUM: The UK Museum Documentation Standard is the national Collections Management standard in the UK. It is used in more than 2,500 museums as a requirement of the Resource [formerly Museums and Gallieries Commission] Registration Scheme. Resource records show that 79% of registered collections are documented to this standard representing an estimated 275,000,000 objects.

We also asked what Collections Management Software is in use:

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Information Management Standards

We asked about:

• Content and Resource description standards including term lists, Classification Syatems and Thesauri
• Content and Structure Description Standards
• Technological Standards and Protocols

Content and resource description standards

The UK response to this section varies in level of detail and whilst examples of all these types of standard are widespread the information citing their use is not readily available. The mda Standards Team pursued a vaiety of avenues in responding to this section. Their efforts included liaising with Resource's (formerly the Museums and Galleries Commission) Senior ICT Adviser, posting queries on the Museum Computer Group discussion list and extrapolating figures from past mda IT survey's.

In the 1996 mda terminology survey a great many respondants said that they used in-house developed term lists for all sorts of collections but there are no overall figures. Details of in-house terminology work can be found below and by seeing the mda Web site for work at:

• Museum of London
• National Army Museum
• National Maritime Museum (NMM), London

The 1996 mda terminology survey does not indicate the scale of usage, i.e. the size of collections a single source such as the ICOM Costume Committee's Vocabulary of Basic Terms for Cataloguing Costume is applied to but does indicate that sources are in use. For example the Social History and Industrial Classification is used extensively in UK museums. There are other sources which have been developed in-house such as the British Museum's Object Name Thesaurus. This is an internal British Museum (BM) thesaurus that has been recently published on the mda Web site. However, its usage outside the BM is unknown. There are also examples of in-house sources developed but as yet unpublished such as the Horniman Museum's (London) Ethnographic Object Names Thesaurus and the Ethno-linguistic Groups Thesaurus. Both of these contain around 4,500 terms and are applied to a collection of 60,0000 objects.

Content and structure description standards

The questions relating to metadata and archive standards in use were difficult to answer on behalf of museums in the UK. Information surveys have tended to concentrate on objects rather than related materials such as library and archive holdings. There is little information relating to the extent of the types of material listed (although it must be assumed that most museums have some collections of this nature to a greater or lessr extent). It is unlikely that any of the standards listed in the questionnaire (International Standards for Bibliographic Description - ISBD) are in use beyond the national museums and larger regional museums (if at all).

It is known that both MARC and AACR2 are used within UK museums but no survey results are available to answer the questions as stated. Elements of AACR2 are incorporated within SPECTRUM and can therefore be said to have a wide application.

Where museums employ professional archivists the standards of the ICA are widely used. There is a clear gap in understanding between the archive and museums community that mda will be attempting to address in its next revision of SPECTRUM. Work is in hand to map the SPECTRUM units of information to ISAD(G), and an archives working group has been established to examine the needs of archives and the relationship between the various standards involved.

Technological Standards and Protocols

Over 400 UK museums are known to be on-line and approximately 450 are currently listed on the 24 Hour Museum. The number of HTML pages are increasing all the time. The situation is further complicated by the fact that many of the museums with the largest on-line presence (mainly the National Museums) are increasingly serving their information from web databases using a more limited number of templates.

The use of SGML and XML documents within museums is unknown, but is probably limited to National and academic museums. However, increasingly collections management systems are being enabled to deliver fully marked-up XML records (including MODES for Windows, which is in wide use within small to medium-sized museums) so its use can be expected to grow. The arrival of XML is likely to curtail the future use of SGML except for more specialised applications. No information is currently available for VRML in UK Museums.

No information is available to answer the specific questions on image format standards, although experience suggests that the following formats are widely used: GIF, JPEG, TIFF, MPEG and BMP.

Although a number of museums are using software capable of being Z39.50 enabled, it is not thought that any are currently doing so. The Arts and Humanities Data Service is making available information derived from museums databases via its constituant parts (such as the Archaeology Data Service). Also the Resource has enabled the FENSCORE database to be Z39.50 enabled.

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Future Vision

The United Kingdom response to our question:

'Please use this space to describe ways in which you consider EMII should develop to provide a value added resource to museums in your country. Feel free to address any aspect of our current remit or to propose new roles. You may be as detailed as you like and include references to publications, Web sites, iniatives etc. Whilst we are developing our vision for EMII's future activities we also want to ensure that we capture your needs and concerns.'

The EMII questionnaire has usefully pointed out the gaps in information regarding museums, not least in the UK. We would like to see a 'fleshing out' of the data available and a commitment to maintaining the currency of the results.

Given that many of the standards being developed which are pertinent to museums are also relevant to other domains, it will be crucial for EMII to have a watching brief on related sectors. We would like to see the remit of EMII being extended to serve all holders of collections, which will enable us to surmount perceived differences between various countries' definitions of 'museum'.

EMII now exists. We would like to see this model network sustained so that the core activities can be extended to non-active partners and other potential member states. In this way individual countries can be supported in developing at a local level their own support mechanisms in cultural information management. The continued active communication between partners is critical.

In addition we would like to see discrete projects that EMII co-ordinates. Some suggestions for these are mapping of European collections management standards to create a 'Euro Spectrum'; a gateway website (business to business?) for support and advice for collections professionals; an interface to other consortia including, for example, international groups, library and archive projects.

Finally we would like to see EMII as the first port of call for any member state which is interested in an existing or potential cultural European project - a one-stop-shop.

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Funded by the European Commission -Education and Culture Directorate-General - Raphaël Programme

Created on 07 July 2000