Over the last four or five years, even before the austerity thing, British cultural collections and internationally-important training and teaching in cultural heritage, have been seen by many institutions as an expensive inconvenience when neither of these has been the case. I just want to list here, so I get it straight in my head, which stories have taken my notice and made the words of my MA supervisor ring in my eyes: “You just have to believe in your heart that it is important and right.”
Closure of Textile Conservation Centre
Sell-off of objects and collections: Southampton, RCM
Mothballing of historic sites: Macclesfield Silk Mill
Outsourcing and sub-contracting services: Southampton
Using collections as a financial pawn: Wedgwood Museum
Eviction of Women’s Library http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=419892&c=1
The Great Woodland Selloff (Kent)
National Grid for Learning mothballed
Creative Spaces gone, no notice to subscribers
Report: Digital Heritage: http://www.hlf.org.uk/aboutus/howwework/Documents/HLF_digital_review.pdf
For all of these examples are several others. Monthly I open my copy of the Museums Journal with a sigh. I flick through the news pages and my eye usually stops briefly at more depressing news, except apparently in Scotland where things seem to be done differently, perhaps.