Glasgow Museums

Earlier this week I caught the train over to Glasgow and catch up with a few museums. To an outsider, the Scottish train system appears far more efficient than what we experience in Australia. Having a much more concentrated population probably helps with this. Edinburgh and Glasgow are only about an hour apart by train and there’s a train between the two departing every 15 minutes, stopping at several key towns in between.

I was met at Glasgow Central station by Chris Jamieson from Glasgow Museums who took me out to Nitshill where Glasgow Resource Centre is located. Although a much larger complex, it reminded me very much of Mitchell in Canberra, where the National Museum, Australian War Memorial and National Archives all have their main stores. This was particularly the case when the train back to town was delayed by 40 minutes due to weather and I was standing there with a number of staff from the Museum huddling together in an attempt to stay warm!

Glasgow Museums are part of Glasgow Life, a Trust set up to manage the recreational facilities of Glasgow Council. The Glasgow Local government area covers 175 km2 and 580,000 people (1.2 million in the greater Glasgow urban area). Glasgow Museums include 8 museums, the resource centre and the open museum program. The Glasgow Museums Resource Centre was built in two stages, the first housing much of the art collections from Kelvingrove and the second taking an incredibly diverse collection from the storage area of the Transport museums (currently being redeveloped at the Riverside Museum). As well as transport and industrial material, the collection includes design, ethnographic, natural science, archaeological, social history and ancient history materials. It’s estimated that there are something close to 1 million objects in the collection and approximately 400 staff across all the Glasgow Museums sites. The storage facility id divided into a series of pods each one housing collections of like materials. The pods are housed within an overall warehouse as buildings within buildings. This system provides an additional buffer between the collection and the outside environment, somewhat like the air pocket within double glazed windows.

The Resource Centre is open for tours which are run regularly either as general interest (highlights) or focused on a particular theme. The curators within Glasgow Museums are being encouraged to develop tours based on topics of interest to them. I was told about one recent tour focused on Shakespeare which highlighted paintings taken from Shakespearean plays, collection items from the Elizabethan era (of Shakespeare's time) and material related to the topics of the plays currently on the school curriculum. Another tour focuses on taxidermy and gives visitors the chance to see the taxidermy areas of the collection. Tours for preschoolers have been developed with one tour that focused on the beach including children lying on beach towels in the store imagining they were at the beach.As well as housing Glasgow Museums collections, the facility provides office facilities for many of the Glasgow Museums staff, conservation labs, exhibition design and production workshops and a learning area.

The Resource Centre is also the home base for the Glasgow Open Museum, a project led by Chris Jamieson. The project aims to bring the museum out to people in Glasgow and uses the collection as a focus. Over a 20 year period the Glasgow Open Museum has worked with people in various parts of Glasgow including setting up within a flat in a tall Housing Commission style block of flats. This provided an opportunity to work with migrant women on a project that started by taking them to look at the Glasgow Collections and selecting objects of interest to them to develop their own art work. The Open Museum collaborates with other groups throughout Glasgow including a foundation that works with refugees who have been victims of torture, a Pakistani community centre providing day services for elderly people, the storytelling networks, and a youth group in a housing trust area.

The Glasgow Open Museum provides small travelling exhibitions to libraries, health centres and shopping centres and has permanent displays in a children's centre, a mosque, and two mini community museums. They also have a loan service where groups can borrow resources including free standing exhibitions, handling kits, Reminiscence kits and tabletop displays.

The Gardener's Ark is the outcome of a two year project with a residential group from Leverndale Hospital and is an active rehabilitation project. The Open Museum worked with hospital residents, staff and community workers to develop independent living skills with a group of adult learners. The group were interested in gardening and visited to museum to look at artworks including still life paintings. They then created their own still life settings using vegetables they had grown and objects from the collection which were then photographed by the museum photographer who assisted with settings and lighting. The learners were then interested in a painting of a herring boat from the collection, which led to the construction of a boat filled with pots of flowers. The boat has been on display at different sites around Glasgow including Leverndale Hospital, Glasgow Museums Resource Centre, the People's Palace Winter Gardens and the Hidden Gardens at Tramways. It is to have a permanent home in the grounds of Leverndale Hospital from this November.

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.

Museums Galleries Scotland

Well I've now had two full days in the offices of Museums Galleries Scotland and what a whirlwind it's been. I was asked to provide a brief talk to the staff about M&G NSW and the museums and galleries of NSW for the second morning so I had a very busy night pulling together something that gave an impression of us and the NSW museum and gallery scene- in 15 minutes! I'm not sure I fully did us justice but people were telling me all afternoon how interesting it was so I guess there was something there.

In putting together the talk I realised how much larger NSW is than Scotland. This is particularly striking when you consider that M&G NSW has about half the staff of Museums Galleries Scotland. MGS offer many of the same services that M&G NSW do, with the major difference being that MGS don't tour exhibitions.

MGS have a really strong interest in research which became focused a few years ago through the development of a research strategy. Following the development of the strategy MGS commissioned a study on the impact of museums on communities as a broad sweep study of this area. This study then led to two further studies undertaken in 2009- Volunteering in Museums and Cornerstones of Communities. What has been great about this research is the manner in which MGS has been able to use it to back up further work such as a wonderful glossy document written to promote the work of museums with Stakeholders also called Cornerstones of Communities and the document that promotes to government he role museums play within communities called How Museums Can Help You

The latest Saatchi exhibition- Newspeak, British Art Now opened in London last night and British Art- Show 7 is on in Nottingham. There's a bit of discussion going on about which is more representative of contemporary art in the UK today. Newspeak doesn't include any audiovisual works, presumably because these are not within the collecting interests of Saatchi which has led people to ask- is it better to have an exhibition of one man's collection or an exhibition curated by outside curators (as is the case with Show 7)? It would seem that this is also an opportunity to debate the strength of the arts in the north and south of the country.


Today I'm attending one of Museums Galleries Scotland's one day workshops, this one is focused on oral history and is being run for the second time this year as it filled up (18 people) when it was held at the beginning of the year. I'll be particularly interested to see what sort of equipment and storage methods are being used over here, as well as how people are using oral history in their museums.