Details

Fleetwood Museum exists to collect, preserve, interpret and share the rich history of Fleetwood. It is a community museum, run by Fleetwood Museum Trust, which took over the operation of the buildings and management of the object collection on behalf of Lancashire County Council on 1 April 2018. The museum receives funding from the people of Fleetwood through Fleetwood Town Council, a third-tier local authority, and we believe we are one of the few museums, if not the only museum, in the country to be funded in this way.

Ben Whittaker, Museum Manager, tells the story:

We received a grant from AIM for a collections audit and this has helped me to establish where the trust currently is in terms of the quality of our collections management, and our general standards of storage and display. There were many useful suggestions for improvements in the report, including the purchase of equipment and materials to help monitor and/or improve temperature and humidity levels, and enhance general standards of care for stored and displayed objects. The audit has also made me feel more confident in our current levels of care and collections management, because the report confirmed that a lot of what we are doing, and either have or plan to put in place, is good practice.

However, an unexpected benefit was the advice on elements of our emergency planning, particularly around an object priority list. This was not an original aim of the audit, but has been a welcome bonus.

I have a small budget for collections management and will be making some purchases using advice from the report. I also plan to identify one or more objects that would most benefit from specialist conservator input. The report highlights the stores and objects most in need of conservation, and this will be used as the basis for making an object selection and future grant application to AIM.

As an organisation only recently independent from council control, the collections audit has been really important in helping us to identify where we are in our current levels of collections care and management. It will provide a foundation for future funding bids and will have a positive impact on policy-writing, including for Accreditation.