dk nkf - Nordisk Konservatorforbund Danmark

Developing a policy and procedure for selecting
& operating historic objects from the collections
of the Science Museum, National Museum of
Science & Industry, UK
The Ethics of Operation: The
Science Museum Perspective
In 1989, Peter Robert Mann, then Curator of
Transport at the Science Museum, wrote a paper for
the International Journal of Museum Management
& Curatorship, vol. 8, entitled “Working Exhibits
and the Destruction of Evidence in the Science
Museum”. The purpose of his paper was “to try to
explain why it is that so many curators of technical
artefacts, particularly transport artefacts, subscribe
to the ethic of the museum profession that their
duty is to preserve evidence, yet devote much of
their professional lives to the destruction of that
evidence.”[1] Mann produced a historical survey of
the policy and practice of sectioning and operating
artefacts at the Science Museum in order to clarify the
issues of demonstration. He found that the museum
had probably been operating objects longer than any
other museum in the world and that sectioning and
operating objects had been a deliberate decision;
the museum was proud of this ad hoc policy and
had extended it to include not only objects from the
engineering collections but from all areas so that, by
1989, all galleries had sectioned or working objects
of some kind. The intent behind this approach was
to make the objects more understandable to the
public; this interpretive technique was entrenched
within the museum. The Science Museum had seen
its primary objective as explaining how things work
rather than in maintaining an encyclopaedic archive
of objects.
The issue as Mann saw it was not with being the
“National Museum of How Things Work” [2]
but with the fact that the museum had never had
martha LesKard
a cohesive approach to selecting and operating
historic objects from the collections. The choice of
objects selected appeared to be a random assortment
of new, old and prime objects. Cumulative damage
was allowed to occur until any sense of originality
or evidential evidence was gone. Objects survived
better than might be expected only because of the
lack of resources required to operate them more than
occasionally and because many decades of operation
could be required before significant deterioration
would occur. Guidelines governing use had not been
written and so curators with individual responsibility
for certain operating objects acted independently,
making unilateral decisions about which objects
should be used and which retired. Mann felt it was
time to stop agonising over the ethics of operating
objects and concentrate on working out the
circumstances in which it was appropriate to operate
in order to achieve the objective of the museum. The
appropriate balance between medium-term needs of
exhibition and the long-term needs of preservation
needed to be established and the practical problems
dealt with.
The Guidelines for Operation:
the Pragmatic Approach
In the early 1990s, Anne Moncrieff, head of
conservation for the Science Museum noted that
“Industrial collections present a difficult challenge in
finding a balance between the ideal and the possible:
between the preservation of physical material and
function and technology and between conservation
and restoration.” [3] She based her approach to
working objects and the problem of the loss of
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