Behind the scenes

One of the tasks that falls to many curators is working with a trust or society that’s involved in the ownership or running of a museum. This morning Jo and I attended a regular meeting of the John Muir Birthplace Trust (surprisingly enough at John Muir’s Birthplace).

It’s an interesting set-up. The building and the ‘permanent’ exhibition (the whole project was funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, ELC and private donations) are owned by the Trust, while the building is operated by the Council’s Museums Service and the revenue cost of opening to the public and running all our public programmes comes from East Lothian Council (and any additional funding we can find).

This creates the potential for ‘interesting’ situations, particularly when you consider that the Council is itself one of the Trust partners. Who sets the mission for the Birthplace? Who has ultimate responsibility for the activities, exhibitions, workshops and events that take place there? Who has the final say, even, on how and when the building is open to the public? In practical terms, much of this is going to be driven by the limits of the Museums Service budget, but it’s not something that we can take unilateral decisions on. Of course, we do have a management agreement that sets out parameters for some of these things, but as is the nature of such agreements, it is not exhaustive, and each situation needs to be judged [cliche alert!] on its merits.

It’s the Museums Service staff, after all, who have the knowledge, skills and experience of running the Birthplace (and our other museums). But we have to be aware that what we do here reflects not just on the Council, but also on the wider community represented on the Trust, and on the Trustees themselves.There will always be a judgement call to be made as to what we can do (for example to take advantage of a new opportunity) without consulting the Trustees - based always on our now two-and-a-half years experience of operating the building and working with the Trust - and what we need to talk to them about. Of course we always hope that we will all agree anyway. I have to say that so far no situations have arisen where there has been a disagreement between the Museums Service and the JMBT. Hmmm, is there any wood handy…?

I suppose what I’m saying is that, in a relationship like this, it all really depends on Trust.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 2nd, 2006 at 2:48 pm and is filed under Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.