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Dissertation Title Zoi-Maria Tsinopoulou Dissertation Title Preservation of Cultural Heritage: The Role of Museums in the protection, conservation and management of cultural collections Zoi-Maria Tsinopoulou SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS, BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION AND LEGAL STUDIES A thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Arts (MA) in ART, LAW AND ECONOMY January 2017 Thessaloniki – Greece Student Name: Zoi-Maria Tsinopoulou SID: 2202150014 Supervisor: Dr. Eleni Korka I hereby declare that the work submitted is mine and that where I have made use of another’s work, I have attributed the source(s) according to the Regulations set in the Student’s Handbook. January 2017 Thessaloniki - Greece Abstract This dissertation was written as part of the MA in Art, Law and Economy at the International Hellenic University. This Master thesis was created in order to study the importance of cultural heritage preservation in conjunction with the role of museums in protecting, conserving and managing our cultural collections as a whole. This dissertation examines the national, social, cultural and economic heritage aspects through an extended literature review pointing out the significance of keeping alive our cultural, natural, historical, architectural, archaeological values through the management of preserving cultural collections for the sake of our future generations. How the notion of Cultural Heritage Preservation will affect the future of our cultural tourism and its impact to our economy? Will the need of ‘digital libraries’ solve future problems in terms of keeping our cultural collections in a safe digital place? From a scientific point of view, the purpose of this dissertation is to advance the field of heritage science through transdisciplinary research with the aim to enhance sustainable preservation of cultural heritage, interpretation and access in service to the global conservation community. I owe special gratitude to my great supervisor Dr Eleni Korka for her advices, guidelines and moral support throughout my research. Lastly, I would like to express my gratitude to all those who contributed to this thesis. Keywords: (museums, collections, digital archives, preservation, cultural heritage development Zoi-Maria Tsinopoulou 31/01/2017 Preface The protection of Cultural Heritage aims to conserve, use and develop the heritage and sustain its values and significance by giving the heritage a fair use regarding the role of museums in terms of management, protection and conservation towards cultural collections. The concept of digital preservation is a relatively new concept that needs to be examined demonstrating the multifarious nature of the topic and the context that can be captured to provide more effective means of search, retrieval, examination, use, management, and preservation for cultural objects in a digital form. The role of museums has an impact on the sustainability of cultural development in relation to the preservation of our cultural heritage, for our present and future generations. Cultural heritage tourism possesses a powerful economic development tool. Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... Preface ................................................................................................................................ Table of Contents ................................................................................................................ Content of Tables ................................................................................................................ Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER ONE: ART AND CULTURAL HERITAGE: MUSEUMS COLLECTION MANAGEMENT POLICY ..................................................................................................... 5 1.1 Museums and Objects ........................................................................................ 5 1.2 The Need to Collect ............................................................................................ 6 1.3 Collections Management Policy .............................................................................. 7 1.3.1 Acquisition and Accessioning ............................................................................. 10 1.3.2 Deaccessioning and Disposals ............................................................................ 11 1.3.3 Public trust theories ........................................................................................... 13 Chapter two: Cultural Heritage Preservation ................................................................. 15 2.1 Museums and Intangible Heritage ........................................................................ 15 2.2 Museums and the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003) ........................................................................................................... 19 Chapter three: <<Digital Libraries>> the conservation of museum collections ............. 23 3.1 Digitization of archives .......................................................................................... 23 3.2 The Digital Museum: Metadata and Information Management .......................... 28 Chapter 4: Creative economy: The value of Museums in Cultural Heritage Development ........................................................................................................................................ 32 4.1 The Concept of Cultural Economics ...................................................................... 32 4.2 Museums in Sustainable Cultural Development ................................................... 37 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 41 Bibliography .................................................................................................................... 43 Appendix ......................................................................................................................... 46 Content of Tables TABLE 1. 1 DRAFTING A COLLECTIONS MANAGEMENT POLICY: SUGGESTED TABLE OF CONTENTS--------- 9 TABLE 1. 2 DIGITAL PROJECTS BY INSTITUTION --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 25 TABLE 1. 3 GOVERNMENT EXPENDITURES FOR CULTURE: TEN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES, CENTRAL AND STATE LEVELS 1985 (EUROS) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 34 TABLE 1. 4 THE FOUR PILLARS OF MUSEUM SUSTAINABILITY -------------------------------------------------------- 39 Introduction Preliminarily, acquisition, conservation, and interpretation of collections include the traditional ordering of museum priorities, not to mention that the second and third priorities have been interchanged as an increased attention is paid in our society to the educational role of museums. In order to make collections even more visible and accessible to the general public, pressure to diminish conservation and preservation considerations is applied. It is important to note that still storage is no treated as highly valued or sacred and only few museums can maintain the policy to keep 80 percent or more of their collections in storage resulted to secondary exhibition areas and de-accessioning is used as an attempt to remove deadwood from storage and to invigorate the collect (Stolow, 1997). As with all cultural institutions, the aim of museums is based on the reflection and contribution to the creation of wide social values and understandings (Pearce, 1994). It is interesting that the entry of a piece into a recognized museum collection, its accession and acquisition, and as curators would state, it reveals a kind of legitimacy and immortality respectively; ‘the piece is lifted from the world of transient goods with its kinship with the world of the outmoded, the worn-out and the rubbish - dust to dust, jumble to jumble - and into that of the culturally durable, the ‘heritage’ as we now call it, to be studied and displayed, protected and defended as the raw material from which cultural values will be spun’ (Pearce, 1994:31). To build on this, the museum process of selection and discrimination is a complicated process taking a long-term business in order to be accomplished; what curators think in the long run is that collecting goes on from one century to the next. Hence, the outcome is to create a set of inter-locking visual and material values, as such what demands aesthetic admiration, what is ‘genuine’ or is not by inference. These are all perceived values and they are in good working order on display in any museum gallery we tend to enter (Pearce, 1994). 1 According to Pearce (1994:31) ‘museums are cultural institutions in their own right, and their cultural nature belongs with their unique identification with the material world’. To what extent, organisational culture underlines a significant role in shaping behaviour in museums (Harrison 2005; Lee 2007, cited in Davies et al. 2013), in addition, values can be described as a set of norms, beliefs and assumptions demonstrate how people behave (Armstrong 2006; O’Reilly & Chatman 1996; Quinn 1988; Schein 2004; Stanford 2010, cited in Davies et al. 2013), values have the ability to affect individual and collective behaviour (Davies et al., 2013) also values play an important role in explaining some of the most fundamental
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