In early July, a group of archive staff travelled to Manchester to attend the Future of Museums: Collection Management event, organised by Museums Association.
Collection management is a complex, collaborative endeavour that involves many different roles at the BFI National Archive. So, we sent representatives from Special Collections, Collections Data and Systems, Collections Access, and Collection Development teams to learn what the museum sector sees on the horizon.
The event included speakers and attendees from collecting institutions of different scales and UK locations, from National Museums Northern Ireland to the Museum of Transology (a community-led collection originating in Brighton). Speakers shared recent projects and research such as the Science Museum Group’s 300,000 item collection move, and Birmingham Museum’s crowd-sourced provenance records transcription activities. Others spoke to upcoming challenges and opportunities for collection management: the ethics of AI tools, using collection management data to advocate for resources, and collaboration and skill-sharing between organisations…