Lifejackets, punk and prisons: new toolkit explores contemporary collecting 9 Aug 2019

Museums Development North West has published a new toolkit for contemporary collecting. It is aimed at staff and volunteers with no direct experience who would like to learn the basics. It discusses how to represent a broader swathe of society, exploring what modern issues will be relevant in the long term, how to plan preservation and how to make decisions that successor generations will not regret. Its case studies include two from the Museum of London – which has recently collected on the themes of Punk and video games; refugee lifejackets acquired by Manchester Museum and Islington Museum’s collecting from Holloway Prison, which closed in 2016. The toolkit will be updated with further case studies from the North West next year. MDNW