IELTS Reading: Matching sentence endings

A visitor to a large museum sees a very small fraction of what the institution holds. The figure varies by discipline and is often quoted loosely, but for a major natural history or archaeology collection the proportion on public display is somewhere between one and five per cent. This is regularly presented as a scandal, usually by people who have not asked what the remainder is for. It is not a backlog of exhibits awaiting a gallery. A museum of this kind is an archive with a gallery attached, and the archive is the part that does the work.

The reason is that scientific value lies in the series rather than in the specimen. One beetle collected in Sussex in 1878 tells you almost nothing. Forty thousand beetles collected across a county over a century and a half tell you which species were where, in what abundance, and in what years they stopped being found, and they can be asked questions that nobody had thought of when they were pinned. Museum birds' eggs from the nineteenth century established the thinning of shells by pesticides. Herbarium sheets have been used to track the timing of flowering against a warming climate. Preserved fish have yielded a record of mercury in the ocean. Not one of these uses was anticipated by the collectors, and none of them would have been possible from a single well-chosen example.

Keeping things is not free, and the costs are of an awkward kind. A store requires controlled temperature and humidity, constant vigilance against insects and mould, and floor space, which in a city is the largest expense of all. None of this produces an event, a photograph or a headline. It is a permanent operating cost attached to an asset that generates no revenue, which makes it the easiest line in any budget to reduce, and the effects of reducing it appear ten or twenty years later in the form of material that has quietly become unusable.

This leads directly to the most contentious question in the profession, which is whether a museum may sell what it holds. The rules of the main professional bodies permit disposal for curatorial reasons, such as transferring material to an institution better placed to care for it, and set themselves firmly against selling to raise money. The argument for selling is easy to state: an institution holding a work worth many millions, and struggling to pay for the roof over the rest, is behaving oddly by refusing to consider it. The argument against is less obvious and, I think, stronger. A collection is held in trust rather than owned, and a museum that has once demonstrated it can convert objects into cash acquires a balance sheet; an institution with a balance sheet will be expected to use it, and the expectation will not be limited to the works its curators would have chosen.

There is a quieter crisis that attracts far less attention. An object without its documentation is close to valueless: a bird skin with no locality, no date and no collector is an ornament. Large parts of many collections are catalogued in ledgers, on index cards, or in database formats that nobody can now search, and a substantial minority are effectively undocumented. Digitisation programmes have made real progress, but they are funded as projects, with an end date, while the work they support is continuous. Cataloguing is a salary, not a grant, and the funding landscape is much better at the second than at the first.

The question of whether certain objects should be held at all has moved a long way in twenty years. Many collections contain material acquired in circumstances that nobody would now defend, and the institutional position has shifted from a general refusal to a case-by-case consideration, with a number of significant returns completed. The principle is now widely accepted; the practice remains difficult, because the hard questions are not about whether but about whom. To which claimant, on what evidence of origin, with what conditions attached, and who decides between two claims from the same region are not questions that a statement of principle settles.

What connects all of this is a mismatch of timescales. The question people ask is whether a particular object is worth keeping, and it is asked by institutions funded in three-year cycles, staffed by people with careers of perhaps thirty years, about material whose usefulness may only become apparent in a century. Nobody in 1878 was collecting beetles in order to document a climate that had not yet changed. The case for keeping things one cannot presently justify is the whole case, and it is exactly the case that no funding round is designed to hear.