Adding collections overviews to MDS

Collection overviews are an incredibly useful starting point for anyone who wants to navigate the nation’s museum holdings. A good overview describes the scope and significance of a collection, noting strengths and highlights, in just a few paragraphs. In the archival world, such ‘finding aids’ are indispensable. The good news is that every one of the UK’s Accredited museums has already written such a summary, as part of its collection development policy. The bad news is that most are not easily accessible.

You’ve done the hard part of writing them; it seems a shame for them to sit there unread rather than being useful to your fellow curators and researchers. All we ask is that you allow these bits of text to be used by us and others for non-commercial purposes and with due credit given to your museum. The overviews are a feature of the Explore Collection section of the MDS website.

Use the form below to upload either your whole collection development policy (in which case we’ll just extract the bits we need) or just the collection overview and collections history. If there are appendices giving more detailed descriptions of your various collections, please include these.

Thank you in advance for sharing yours. If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to email us on support(at)museumdata.uk, replacing (at) with @.

Your name

Your organisation

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Licence Agreement
The organisation named in this submission permits the Museum Data Service and others to re-use the collections history and collections overview (and any relevant appendices referred to in the overview) contained in the uploaded document under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence ("CC BY-NC 4.0").

If the uploaded document is a full collection development policy, this licence will only apply to the sections headed 'history of the collections' and 'overview of current collections' and or similar (and relevant appendices) that describe the history, extent, scope and significance of the current collections. The Museum Data Service will not re-use the other sections of the document.

The Museum Data Service will publish the collections history and collections overview (including relevant appendices referred to in the overview) online along with a credit to the organisation named in this submission and the CC BY-NC 4.0 licence under which your organisation has licensed these texts. The Museum Data Service may edit them for the sake of consistency with its house style.

The CC BY-NC 4.0 licence requires that the Museum Data Service and other re-users give credit to your organisation as the creator. It allows re-users to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, for noncommercial purposes only.

By ticking the 'licence agreement' box you confirm that your organisation licenses re-use of the uploaded collections history and collections overview (including relevant appendices referred to in the overview) under the terms of CC BY-NC 4.0, and that you are authorised to make that confirmation.
Licence agreement

Your document (must be .pdf, .doc, or .docx) *
Upload your document here. You can either upload a version containing only the collections history and collections overview extracted from your collections development policy (along with any relevant appendices), or the whole policy if that's easier. We'll ignore the parts we don't need.

What year was the information you are uploading last updated?

Adding collections overviews to MDS

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