Understanding the National Museums’ Partnership activities in 2020/21
This report is an overview of the partnerships of the 22 national UK museums, revealing how museum partnerships benefit partners, audiences and wider society.
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The national museums in the UK hold world-class collections. Lending objects is a key way in which the national museums can increase public access to their collections both in the UK and internationally, in museums and elsewhere.
This is the fourth Museum Partnership Report that focuses on sharing collections and includes 22 national museums, covering 75 sites and focuses on activity during the financial year 2020/21.
As with the 2018/19 and 2019/20 reports, the national museums have been surveyed on their collection sharing activities. However, this year the survey has been expanded to include a broader range of partnership activities similar to the inaugural report covering 2017/18.
Key findings for 2020/21, unsurprisingly, show that most activities were impacted by the pandemic in some way. In particular, sharing collections activities were affected and many exhibitions were cancelled or postponed. Therefore the numbers are significantly lower than in previous years for these activities.
In 2020/21 the national museums undertook 1,214 loans (both long and short term) of 19,150 objects in the UK. There were 346 loans of 4,997 objects lent internationally. This gives a total of 1,560 loans out (a 32% decrease on 2019/20) of 24,147 objects (a 66% decrease on 2019/20).