Would you accredit it?

Disappointingly, we won’t be the first in Britain to be accredited, as I read in the latest MJ (that’s Museums Journal, not the Municipal Journal) that a museum in Cornwall has achieved that honour. Still we may be in the first group in Scotland. Which is nice.

However - the entire scheme is still as focused on buildings as ever, despite the promise of looking at museum services as a whole, and despite the fact that almost everything that accreditation measures in about collections care and services to the public, not buildings. It’s as if MLA just can’t get out of their minds the fixed picture of what a museum is: a (one, singular) building with collections (that belong only to that building because the museum only has one building), with staff (who all work in that building) and exhibitions (that only ever happen in the building). Essentially, every museum must follow the model of the BM.

For some reason it seems that the people in MLA can’t deal with the messy fuzziness of reality, and so have preferred to force fit the variously-shaped pegs of every museum in the UK into their round hole. So we all have to pretend a little making one of our museums stand in for ‘the service’ when in fact all our staff and collections are based in another building eleven miles away (and one that can’t be accredited as it’s not open to the public except by appointment).

Sigh. It makes me wonder if any of the civil servants who draw up schemes like this have any experience of actually working in museums. Real experience however seems to be something thats frowned upon in the Civil Service, especially in the London-based offices.

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