This smart “companion” is a “companion” somewhere between the Oxford Companions with their paragraph or so entries arranged alphabetically, and the Cambridge Companions with their lengthy thematic chapters. This Companion, the twelfth to be published in Blackwell's Cultural Studies series, has, in addition to the introductory chapter on museum studies by the editor, 32 chapters averaging 17 pages each, grouped in six subject areas. These are: Part 1: Perspectives, Disciplines, Concepts; Part 2: Histories, Heritage, Identities; Part 3: Architecture, Space, Media; Part 4: Visitors, Learning, Interacting; Part 5: Globalization, Profession, Practice; Part 6: Culture Wars, Transformations, Futures. Each part has its own introduction. There are a total of 36 contributors from around the world.
Articles are well illustrated with black and white photographs (71 in all) and feature extensive bibliographies. I must confess, though, that the IT Gallery of the National Portrait Gallery (p. 548) looked a soulless place – just computer terminals and blank walls, but against this there is the report from the British Museum Compass system that “We logged around 800 hours of unsupervised public use on five work stations during April … The average number of museum artefacts looked at in each session was 18” (p. 312). I guess it depends on what you see when you look – a book can be dull without the ability to read, or even when you can, and this is the challenge of library and museum professionals, to bring print and objects alive.
Among topics that caught my eye were De‐accessioning Policies; Competition for Public Subsidies; and a timely and provocative chapter on Making and Remaking National Identities. Chapters such as Space Syntax: The Language of Museum Space; Cultural Economics; and Postmodern Restructurings indicate an academic slant, though The Origin of the Public Museum; Heritage; and Studying Visitors represent more traditional concerns.
Museum studies today are miles away from how the casual visitor and amateur collector may envisage them: there is now a science of museology. I recently retired from being a museum trustee, finding the constant round of performance objectives, VAT tax disputes, funding problems, government and Charity Commissioners' policies, and management issues far too much like being back at work! But I appreciate that this is the world in which museums operate and I can see that museum professionals and those associated with them, will greatly value this companion to their concerns. I would add, though, that the focus is academic and inspirational rather than practical; it is book for the professionals rather than amateur trustee or reference library visitor.
There is an index, principally a name index, though there is a scattering of concepts. In the “l”s, for example, are labelling, law, learning, layout, languages, legibility, and leisure. The indexing of concepts is a difficult task, particularly in works of multiple authorship. I was amused to find 13 subheadings for “knowledge” yet only one for “leisure”. I admire the (anonymous) indexer for his/her philosophical nous in tackling the former, but feel that the latter deserved more mentions. Concerning my years as a trustee, I was disappointed that so few of the subjects that concerned me and my companions feature in the index; trustees and volunteers are in, but not charities or Charity Commission, VAT (we, the Brontë Parsonage Museum, and the London Zoo, won a famous victory over the UK Inland Revenue on the governance issue), objectives, aims and gift aid.
The physical production is excellent; I noticed particularly the boxed page number which work well. There are frequent sub‐headings to aid navigation. This is definitely a book for the museum director's desk and for library collections on museum and cultural studies.
