Cutting edge

University museums once took the lead in conserving our heritage. With a little modest investment, they can do so again.

According to Phillips' New World of Words (1706), a museum was "a study or library; also a college or public place for the resort of learned men". By then John Tradescant's Cabinet of Curiosities had become the Ashmolean Museum, which opened in Oxford in 1683, anticipating the foundation of the British Museum by well over half a century.

Although Cambridge had to wait until 1816 for Fitzwilliam to bequeath his art collection to the university, his gift pre-dated the establishment of the National Gallery by several decades. The universities took the lead in preserving what we now regard as our patri-mony. In the 20th century, Lady Barber's belief in "the study and encouragement of art and music" led her to found the institute named after her husband, at the University of Birmingham. In 1958, the Whitworth Art Gallery was rescued from insolvency by the University of Manchester in a move as enlightened as it would be unlikely today.

A natural affinity exists between universities and collections because of the value of mat-erial culture for research and teaching. Yet the recent history of university museums has not been without problems. Museums have had a hard time competing against teaching departments for university funds. But with the introduction of special factor funding in 1986, the largest university museums were rescued from a position that was at best unenviable. It may have been the need to protect resources intended for research and teaching that led the funding bodies to allocate non-formula funding specifically for museums. But one immediate and benign effect was to change the relationship between museums and academic departments within universities. The museums that receive non-formula funding enjoy a double advantage: they tend to be given credit for bringing additional resources to their universities and they are seen less as competitors and more as academic services. For the art museums concerned, these changes have coincided with a new focus on the visual arts in the teaching of the humanities. As universities seek to broaden the scope of higher education, they are beginning to realise that their museums have become what the Higher Education Funding Council for England describes as "key players in the cultural sector as a whole".

But university museums and galleries now await the review of special funding by their new paymaster, the Arts and Humanities Research Board. The early signals are positive; the AHRB has promised to introduce a scheme guided by the kind of objective and transparent criteria that characterise its other awards. But it is unrealistic to expect more than minor adjustments to the existing distribution of funds.

We are now in the second year of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport's challenge funding for Designated Collections, for which a significant number of university museums qualify. For most of us this first, modest stream of direct funding provides a vital source of income to improve documentation, displays and interpretation. It does not, as yet, extend to provenance research, which has become another urgent task for museums with collections acquired during the middle decades of the 20th century. For university museums must continue to develop as institutions at the cutting edge. With a relatively modest investment of new resources, they could reclaim the initiatives that belonged to them historically, in conservation and in arts and heritage management. Perhaps it is time to reintroduce the symbiosis that existed 300 years ago between the words "university" and "museum".

Duncan Robinson is director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.