Choices for Change

I'm including some general view from around Edinburgh in this post as it's not a particularly image strong topic.

As you will have no doubt heard, the Arts Community, including museums and galleries, are dealing with a greatly changed environment across the UK. Whilst the Scottish government has yet to announce its budget for the coming year, there is great concern about the impact of budget cuts on museums across Scotland. Museums Galleries Scotland have been approached by a number of museums, galleries and local governments over the past 6 months who have been exploring alternative mechanisms for managing the museums and galleries under their care.

Museums and Galleries Scotland have responded to this by preparing a toolkit called Choices for Change, which provides a means for museums, galleries and local government with a self assessment process to analyse what services museums and galleries are delivering to their local community and their local government. While it aims to provide an opportunity to look at alternative operational models, it is equally useful for museums and galleries who want to outline to their local government the sort of services they are providing to their community. In this manner there may be information that could be drawn from this process to inform council's cultural/social planning or overall planning processes. Equally it could be useful for museums and galleries who need to outline their services/operation in situations where council is looking to change their operational structures.

Certainly this model has been developed for a Scottish environment which is somewhat different to the Australian environment, but there may be information that could be adapted for Australian situations.