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Accepted Paper:
The Swedish Museum Law meets Spectrum: heritage diplomacy in theory, policy, and practice.
Elin von Unge
(Stockholm University)
The aim of this paper is to examine the interface of two heritage policies born in separate and different national contexts – the new Swedish museum law and the UK-born and based collection management standard Spectrum – as a case of heritage diplomacy.
Paper long abstract:
Spectrum is a collection management standard developed in the UK by the Collections Trust. By using Spectrum UK-museums are accredited. Today Spectrum has been translated and is used in many countries around the world. In Sweden, the National Heritage Board translated the standard in 2018-2019. Many museums are now in the process of implementing the standard in a Swedish museum context. In 2018 four museums in the city of Gothenburg, governed by the local Cultural Administration, started the complex procedure of implementing the standard in connection to relocating the museum collections to new facilities.
In a parallel process the Swedish government launched a museum law, until then unprecedented (2017:563). One aim was to safeguard the principle of arm’s-length distance between museums and party-political influence (2017:563, §4, §5). Other distinctive paragraphs stated that museums should contribute to research and knowledge-building processes by securing a high competence within the museum’s subject matter (§8) and that an active collection management is essential (§9; autor’s italics and translation). The Cultural Administration in Gothenburg considered and applied paragraph eight and nine in the proceedings of implementing their new Spectrum based collection management policies.
In this paper the aim is to examine the interface of two heritage policies, born in separate and different national contexts – the new Swedish museum law (2017:563) and the UK-born and based collection management standard Spectrum – as a case of heritage diplomacy.