Bridport Museum awarded full Arts Council Accreditation status. Bridport Museum was extremely happy to find out last week that it has again achieved full Museum Accreditation status.
Accreditation is managed by Arts Council England, the body responsible for setting the nationally agreed set of standards required of Museums. Bridport Museum first achieved Accreditation in 2009, but it is reviewed approximately every 3 years, with its progress being tracked in great detail.
The Museums are judged in three main areas: how well they look after their visitors and audiences; how well they look after their collections; and how well they manage their overall organisation. The Museum had to submit lots of paperwork to be assessed, including their Collections Development Policy, and to answer lots of questions about the work that they undertake.
Curator Emily Hicks said :
“We are delighted to have achieved Accreditation once again, as it feels like our hard work is acknowledged as being of a good standard. The only area they recommended for improvement was to deal with our backlog in documentation. We are already working hard on this- we estimate that there are over 50,000 items in our collection, so cataloguing each one is quite a task, and is primarily done by volunteers!”
There are currently about 1800 museums in the UK which are part of the Accreditation scheme, established in 1988. Since then it has led the way in raising museum standards in the UK and has been used as a source of inspiration for similar schemes overseas.
