Collections Management as Critical Museum Practice

Collections Management as Critical Museum Practice edited by Cara Krmpotich and Alice Stevenson is due to be published on 22 July 2024.

Collections Management as Critical Museum Practice recognises collections management as a political, critical and social project, involving considerable intellectual labour that often goes unacknowledged within institutions and in the fields of museum and heritage studies.

This volume brings into focus the knowledges, value systems, ethics and workplace pragmatics that are foundational for this work. Rather than engaging solely with cultural modifications, such as Indigenous care practices, the book presents local knowledge of place and material which is relevant to how collections are managed and cared for worldwide.

Through discussion of varied collection types, management activities and professional roles, contributors develop a contextualised reflexive practice for how core collections management standards are conceptualised, negotiated and enacted. Chapters span national museums in Brazil and Uganda to community-led heritage work in Malaysia and Canada; they explore complexities of numbering, digitisation and description alongside the realities of climate change, global pandemics and natural disasters.

The book offers a new definition of collections management, travelling from what is done to care for collections, to what is done to care for collections and their users. Rather than ‘use’ being an end goal, it emerges as a starting point to rethink collections work.

The fully open access monograph may be downloaded from the UCL Press website when published.

Further details

• UCL Press