u ‘A developing sense of crisis’: a new look at university collections in the United Kingdom – Kate Arnold-Forster

u Dealing with change: university museums of natural history in the United States – Peter B. Tirrell

u University collections in Aotearoa New Zealand: active past, uncertain future – Neville Hudson and Jane Legget

u University museums in Japan: a time of transition  - Tatsufumi Kinoshita and Ryo Yasui

u From campus to city: university museum in Australia – Sue-Anne Wallace

u University and universality in Belgium – Bernard van den Driessche

u Forum UNESCO – University and Heritage – Jonathan Bell

Profile

u Managing a museum 120 km long - Arthur Gillette

Architecture

u Towards a new vision of the museum: the Kunsthaus of Bregenz – Mihail Moldoveanu

Summary of Articles

u Educating the muses: university collections and museums in the Philippines
Ana P. Labrador

‘This is a period of reckoning for old and new museums in the Philippines in general and the university museums in particular.’ With this in mind, Ana P. Labrador describes the growth and the renewed importance of university museums that characterize the Philippines today. The author is assistant professor of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines in Diliman. She is a specialist in museum studies and the theory and aesthetics of non-western art. She has a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge in England, focusing on museology and material culture, and has recently published articles in Humanities Research, ArtAsia Pacific Journal and Cambridge Anthropology.

u ‘A developing sense of crisis’: a new look at university collections in the United Kingdom
Kate Arnold-Forster

A growing concern with the care and handling of some of the richest university museum collections in the world led to a nation-wide review and sparked considerable new thinking in the United Kingdom. Kate Arnold-Forster, formerly a practising curator, is a museum consultant specializing in collection surveys and reviews, and in strategic matters. She has been involved in five of the regional surveys of higher education collections in the United Kingdom: in London, the north of England, the south-west, the Midlands and the South-eastern Museum Service (Western Region). Other recent research projects include a review of British music museums (Museums of Music, HMSO/MGC, 1993), and collaboration in the museum sector (Collaboration Between Museums, MGC, 1998). She is a member of the Museums and Galleries Commission (MGC) Museums Registration Panel and a fellow of the Museums Association.

u Dealing with change: university museums of natural history in the United States
Peter B. Tirrell

Their unique position as a link between scientists and the public has lent a new dynamic to university museums of natural history in the United States. Peter B. Tirrell is associate director of the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History at the University of Oklahoma. He played a pivotal role in the strategic planning, design and development of a 45-million-dollar project that includes a new facility for the museum and is the immediate past president of the Association of College and University Museums and Galleries. With more than twenty-six years of professional experience, he has served on visiting committees for the Accreditation Commission of the American Association of Museums and on survey teams for the Museum Assessment Program.

u University collections in Aotearoa New Zealand: active past, uncertain future
Neville Hudson and Jane Legget

Stepping up partnerships with mainstream museums is a new path being taken by a number of university museums in New Zealand – and for many of them, their very survival is at stake. Neville Hudson is a geologist by profession and has been collection manager of palaeontological collections and teaching resources manager in the Department of Geology at the University of Auckland since 1996. He has recently also taken responsibility for the rocks and minerals collections. Janet Legget has worked in museums in the United Kingdom and New Zealand. She is currently a co-manager of the New Zealand Museum Standards project, an initiative of the National Services of Te Papa – the Museum of New Zealand, and an associate lecturer in Museum Studies at Massey University. She is the author of Local Heroines: A Travel Guidebook to Women’s History in Great Britain (London, Pandora Press, 1994).

u University museums in Japan: a time of transition
Tatsufumi Kinoshita and Ryo Yasui

A growing awareness of the untapped, often neglected riches to be found in Japanese universities is giving rise to a new impetus on behalf of university museums. Tatsufumi Kinoshita is a researcher at the Institute of Exhibition Art and Technology Co. Ltd, and was assistant curator at Minato City Local History Museum, Tokyo, from 1988 to 1990. Ryo Yasui is an independent museum media co-ordinator in Tokyo and currently a lecturer of museum studies at Obirin University, Tokyo. Tatsufumi Kinoshita and Ryo Yasui were editor and associate editor, respectively, of the Directory of Museums, Vol. 1: University Museums; Vol. 2: Children’s Museums (Tokyo, Total Media Development Institute Co. Ltd, 1997/98).

u From campus to city: university museum in Australia
Sue-Anne Wallace

Two worlds are now essential to the security and growth of university museums in Australia: the campus and the city. Sue-Anne Wallace explains how this relationship took shape and what it might augur for the future. She was recently course director of the Museum Leadership Programme at the Melbourne Business School, University of Melbourne, and until July 1999 director of Museum Education and Curatorial Programmes at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and acting director of the museum since late 1998. She has been president of Museums Australia since 1996, and sits on a number of boards and committees associated with universities and the cultural sector, including the Australian Indigenous Cultural Network and the Constitutional Centenary Foundation, in which role she has been working to have cultural issues considered in the Australian debate on the constitution and the republic.

u University and universality in Belgium
Bernard van den Driessche  

In Belgium, the model of the university museum as an outgrowth of and responsive to a closely knit academic community is gradually giving way to that of an institution which aims to serve a larger public. But this evolution has been uneven and is far from universal, as explained by Bernard van den Driessche, administrator of the Museum of Louvain-la-Neuve (Catholic University of Louvain), which he helped set up in 1979. Vice-chairman from 1992 to 1995 of the ICOM Belgian National Committee, he was co-ordinator of several issues of La vie des musées (Museum Life) published by the French-speaking Association of Belgian Museums. He is currently president of Museums and Society in Wallonia, an association formed in 1998.

u Forum UNESCO – University and Heritage
Jonathan Bell

A unique project that has UNESCO and universities world-wide joining forces to safeguard the cultural heritage is described by Jonathan Bell, a graduate of Harvard University and the Sorbonne, who has extensive academic and hands-on experience with Buddhist murals in China and Tibet. As a UNESCO consultant, he helped develop and administer a number of cultural heritage projects around the world, particularly Forum UNESCO – University and Heritage. He is currently pursuing graduate studies at Columbia University.

u Managing a museum 120 km long
Arthur Gillette

How do you manage what might be called the longest museum in the world? To find out in the most down-to-earth way possible, Arthur Gillette recently hitched a rucksack onto his shoulders and biked some 70 km along the many extant vestiges (and a string of attendant museums) of the Roman wall that originally stretched 120 km across England from east to west, from the North Sea to the Solway Firth. The author, an intrepid outdoorsman, is former editor-in-chief of Museum International and, since his retirement in 1998, a freelance writer on cultural heritage issues and guide to strolls through the history of Paris.

u Towards a new vision of the museum: the Kunsthaus of Bregenz
Mihail Moldoveanu

Museum architecture and museum collections are not always compatible, and new buildings may overshadow the works they were designed to enhance. A notable exception is described by Mihail Moldoveanu, a freelance photographer and writer based in Paris.