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'The rhino horn on display has been replaced by a replica': Museum security in Finland and England

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Version 2 2020-12-03, 16:49
Version 1 2016-03-16, 16:14
journal contribution
posted on 2020-12-03, 16:49 authored by Louise Nicholas, Suzie Thomas
Museums are an integral part of the cultural life of societies. As well as intangible value, many collections may also have considerable financial value, and pose a temptation to thieves. Furthermore, threats exist from accidents, natural disasters and vandalism, among many other risks that have to be built into museums security measures. In recent years, high profile art thefts from museums and even, regrettably, acts of terror, have drawn attention to the vulnerability of museum institutions as sites of crime and catastrophe. In particular, balancing visitor enjoyment and accessibility of the exhibits with security can be difficult for many. Despite awareness of these concerns, museums security remains to date under-represented in museological discourses, perhaps in part to its perceived pragmatic nature. Another reason may be the difficulty of discussing often confidential and sensitive information in a meaningful way. In this paper, based on research carried out in Finland and England, we aim to analyse some of the key issues for museums security, which while focussing on situations in Northern European settings, have relevance for museums globally. We set this discussion against the backdrop of ethical considerations and present our methodology for both gathering the data and discussing it in a way which is both sensitive to confidentiality issues but still of use to the wider security, museums and cultural heritage sectors.

Funding

This exploratory research was funded by the University of Helsinki Future Development Fund.

History

Published in

Journal of Conservation and Museum Studies

Volume

14

Issue

1

Pages

1

Citation

GROVE, L.E. and Thomas, S., 2016. The rhino horn on display has been replaced by a replica: museum security in Finland and England. Journal of Conservation and Museum Studies, 14 (1), pp. 1.

Publisher

Ubiquity Press / © The Authors

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2016-01-16

Publication date

2016-03-16

Notes

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

ISSN

1364-0429

Language

  • en