The law relating to the museum sector is complex. This is due in part to the variety of governance structures; for example, amongst other possibilities, museums may exist as a company or charitable trust, or both, or may be under local authority control. Objects in the collection may be on loan, or they may be held on trust, or owned by a company, or by a local authority. Furthermore, whereas special legislation applies to national museums, different statutory sources need to be considered in relation to local authorities. Yet there is no book covering both law and museum ethics to help guide museums in relation to the management of their collections. Museums strive to maintain public trust and confidence in a challenging financial climate and the need for information to assist them in arriving at informed judgments has never been stronger. The results of this project will include, amongst other outputs, a book discussing how legal and ethical principles apply to museum collections, and a Report on the Legal Status of Museum Collections. The book will make a unique and scholarly contribution to the fields of law, museum studies and cultural studies. The book will provide information and practical advice for museums. A number of public bodies in the museum and charity sector have expressed strong support for this work and I will consult these bodies, and others, as this work progresses. I will provide opportunities for professionals to raise issues which concern them, such as by participating in the Museums Association's annual conference and at other national and regional conferences and workshops. This level of consultation will ensure that the contents of my outputs remain relevant. Museums currently have insufficient guidance on a number of topics. For example, many museums possess items which were collected in the past but where no record exists in relation to their acquisition. This is a problem which has created immense difficulties for museums. The book will address these pressing concerns, providing legal and ethical guidance for curators, managers and governing bodies. In this context, it will explore the possibilities for law reform, examining recommendations made by the Scottish Law Commission and considering the potential for a more limited legislative reform for all museums in the UK. In a fast-changing world, museums are expected to develop new strategies to enhance public access to their collections. This research will therefore cover legal and ethical issues relating to art loans, providing guidance and discussing pitfalls. It will also provide impartial information relating to legal structures. For example, charitable status may offer independence, financial advantages, and better protection to the collection. The recent court decision involving the Wedgwood Museum Collection has highlighted the risks involved where a public collection is affected by a company insolvency. The decision demonstrates how important it is to disseminate information about the law to ensure that there is responsible decision making. Although this project is ambitious in scope and addresses entirely underresearched areas, it is manageable because it builds upon my accumulated expertise. I acquired knowledge relating to deaccessioning and sale of objects from museum collections, together with experience of working with public sector bodies, during the course of a 50% AHRC Placement Fellowship. I have written on the law relating to acquisition of cultural items by museums in a book discussing strategic measures to combat the illicit trade in art and antiquities. Some matters, such as the law relating to insolvency and corporate governance, involve drawing on expertise gathered when I wrote a substantial book on the law of commercial fraud. However, the outputs from this new project will also involve a close examination of museum ethics and how these principles interact with the law.

Museums now face some of the most serious challenges in their history. Most are under-resourced which often means that innovative agendas to promote the common good are abandoned in favour of conventional approaches to practice. Financial pressure is causing some museum leaders to consider choices, from selling collections to dismantling outreach programmes, that may compromise their institutions' standing into the future. Ethics, as opposed to law, is ostensibly self-regulating but there are increasingly strident calls for stronger enforcement. Museums and related professional bodies are writing, reviewing and tightening up ethics codes. Legal intervention is being considered more closely. Traditional museum ethics discourse, created to instil professional practice and maintain power structures through a system of consensus and its correlative, coercion, is unable to meet the needs of museums and society; it offers few inroads for divergent voices or radical rethinking. New theories and methods are needed to take museums into the future. Five workshops are proposed that employ creative methods to encourage museum professionals, academics and the Museums Association together to problem-solve during a time of crisis and map an ethics framework useful to a 21st century museum sector. Cross-disciplinary links between museum studies and ethics create a novel approach to exploring difficult issues. Network participation encompasses the unique contributions of national and international leaders in ethics discourse and represents diverse strands in museum activity, as ethics is key to every part of the museum. What participants share is an understanding of the contingent nature of museum ethics--its responsiveness to economic, social, political and technological forces--and a desire to translate theory into practice. Synergy among project partners will catalyze innovative thought. Initiating partner, the Research Centre for Museums & Galleries (RCMG) at the University of Leicester, brings a trajectory of experience researching the social role of museums. The School of Museum Studies in which RCMG resides works with museums internationally to develop creative practice through leading edge research and teaching; principal Investigator Marstine is introducing an ethics strand to its campus-based M.A. programmes. She is founder and former director of the Institute of Museum Ethics at Seton Hall University. Partner two, the Museums Association (MA), is the voice for museums in the UK and sets ethical standards for the sector. Partner three, the Inter-Disciplinary Ethics Applied Centre for Excellence in Teaching & Learning (IDEA CETL), University of Leeds, helps professionals across disciplines identify, analyse and respond effectively to ethical issues they encounter in their careers. Workshop 1 redefines museum ethics and looks at social engagement as an ethics agenda. Workshop 2 explores the transformative potential of transparency and the changing role of ethics codes. Workshop 3 considers new attitudes of shared responsibility towards museum assets--buildings, collections and knowledge. Workshop 4 focuses on a specific type of museum-the art gallery-and the challenges it faces in engaging new museum ethics. Workshop 5 discusses environmental and economic sustainability and envisions new models for ethical practice. Outputs include dissemination of a project digest on partner websites/social media; a training seminar on the new ethics offered through the MA; an article in the MA's Museums Journal setting a framework for engaging 21st-century museum ethics; a "rethinking museum ethics" activity at the 2013 MA conference; a peer-reviewed essay by Marstine informed by Workshop 4; a talk at the 2013 American Association of Museums conference on embedding ethics in museum studies; network evaluation-potentially leading to revision-of the MA ethics code; and collaboration among participants to develop future initiatiatives

This Network brings social and health science scholars into dialogue with museum scholars, leaders and policy makers to create a sustainable research agenda focused on the museum attendance and benefit gap. The network will draw in scholars with expertise in inequality, poverty and low educational attainment, experts in culture and health, public health, health and cultural attendance, and scholars of implementation science with expertise in rigorous approaches to intervention development and harnessing research for large-scale change. The Network explores the hypothesis that a deeper understanding within museums and museology of (1) the nature and experience of inequality and (2) how large-scale social and behaviour change is approached in fields such as health, will open up the capacity to understand, theorise, design, implement, evaluate and sustain practices which may address the museum attendance and benefit gap. Data from the official Taking Part Survey, which includes the attendance gap between Upper and Lower Socio-economic Groups in England, show that it has increased from 22.7 percentage points (pp) to 24.7pp over the past 15 years. The same pattern is evident in the rest of the UK. Sociologically, museum visiting reflects the socio-economic gradient, closely tracking inequalities in education, income, employment, mental health and other indicators of social wellbeing. This analysis is supported by decades of research in cultural sociology internationally which, regardless of methodological or theoretical approach, confirms that people who participate in and benefit from state-sponsored cultural forms including museums, are, in the main, from upper socio-economic groups and that the single most important predictor of museum visiting is not class, ethnicity or income but level of prior educational achievement. Population-level studies in the epidemiology of culture, which tell us that simply visiting a museum may have positive health benefits, emphasises the lack of fairness in the current distribution of cultural resources and the way museums reflect and contribute to established inequalities in health and wellbeing. Despite 40 years of concerted efforts by museums of all genres and scales, supported by national and local government policy and targeted investment, including more than £5 billion of Lottery Funding, the strategies used by museums in the UK to reduce inequalities in museum visiting are not working. Whilst pockets of positive transformation have been achieved, museums have failed to find ways to understand, consolidate, share and sustain progress. Focused on measuring small-scale impact and without an evaluation framework linking the activities of individual museums and the ways in which they utilise visitor research with the macro data from surveys like the Taking Part Survey or with the sociological literature on inequality, museums' current uses of research cannot offer insights into the larger question of representative participation. To begin to positively impact deeply entrenched and unequal patterns of attendance and benefit and make credible claims about their contribution to society, museums need to understand the extent to which the attendance and benefit gap is driven by societal factors, which museum interventions are most likely to have an impact, and how they can harness and grow their research capacity to move beyond 'intuitive' approaches to inequality and social change. The new partnerships and synergies the Network will generate are urgent: increasing inequality, the long-term impact of post-2011 austerity, and the dramatic impacts of COVID and new technologies are changing patterns of visiting, often in ways that increase inequalities. As the cultural sector seems likely to face a new round of austerity, having a clearer, more realistic, understanding of how museums might make a greater and more transparent contribution to society will be invaluable.

The Covid-19 crisis is having a significant impact on the museum sector, nationally and globally. It is exposing the vulnerability of museums, their staff, projects and collections. Elsewhere, innovative programming is demonstrating the vitality and versatility of an engaged, responsive and participatory museum service, proving that museums are places of relevance even in a crisis. This research project focuses on how museums can continue to contribute to community resilience and wellbeing in a time of crisis. It addresses sector adaptability as it adjusts audience engagement and collaboration (such as new collecting practices, programming and exhibitions) in response to Covid-19. The differing responses during the Covid-19 crisis - in some museums staff were furloughed yet elsewhere they have been involved in responsive projects - uncovers deeper attitudes to the essential (or otherwise) nature of museum services. Going forward, this project will lead and inform the sector as it adapts to effective community-digital possibilities that still embraces new thinking in participation and engagement. Alongside this, the project evaluates how we adapt our practices to be mindful of audience diversity, digital poverty, and the isolation challenges for vulnerable audiences arising from Covid-19. Rising to that challenge this project: 1. identifies how museum pedagogy and practices must adapt to new audience needs; 2. explores possibilities for co-produced community-digital innovation; and, 3. investigates the offer museums can make to support community resilience during and in the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis. The importance of this project lies in the following areas. Firstly, new knowledge about the understanding of the impact of Covid-19 on the museum sector in NI that will both inform the Department for Communities (DfC) and have national relevance. Secondly, by generating new thinking around the community-digital dynamic and leading innovation as museums adapt. Thirdly, understanding the new needs around community resilience and wellbeing, arising from Covid-19. The Museums Association's response to the Covid-19 enquiry described museums as vital in supporting communities, promoting community cohesion, enabling wellbeing, and reflection on significant public issues. Many of our museums work with vulnerable groups, who will remain cautious/shielding post lockdown e.g. the Dementia Friendly Programme (NI Museums Council). This project will investigate the impact of putting such programmes on hold, how they can be effectively adapted/reinstated, and make recommendations for immediate application/future planning.

It is people who drive digital change in the museum. Irrespective of the focus on 'technology' (on hardware and software, standards and systems, products and platforms), it will, in fact, always be the leaders and curators, partners and stakeholders, who enable the digital capability of museums. And yet, the lived professional experience of individuals inside the organisation, in the workforce, around digital change is little understood, much overlooked, and frequently generalised upon. Plainly put: the very dimension that we now know is fundamental to digital change in the museum, is that about which - in our scholarship and practice - we know the least. Moreover, at a time when museums are not only attempting to understand new forms of visitor participation and digital experience, but are doing so within a moment of both institutional and individual precarity, this need to understand the human (and not just the technical) dimension of museum digital change, becomes crucial. And so, it is to this issue - and this gap in our knowledge of museum digital maturity - that this project looks. '3 by 3' is an 18-month, multi-partner, transatlantic research collaboration, bringing together cultural institutions, academics and professional bodies to open new directions for leading empathetic and equitable digital change in museums at a time of institutional and individual precarity. The project asks what new models of 'empathic leadership' might be needed to enable the holistic institutional adoption of (and adaption to) digital, as well as which inequalities exist in the landscape of digital change in museums, and how can these be confronted. In doing so, '3 by 3' attempts to initiate a retelling of what successful digital leadership in museums looks like - in human and not just business and technological terms. This research confronts and articulates a new set of questions on equity, inclusion and diversity within the digital workforce, workplace and culture of museum digital change, re-locating museum technology as a socially purposeful subject and set of practices. In this way, the project is leading an 'emotional turn' in museum computing and digital heritage, characterised by a new sensibility to the emotional labour, affective practices and personal storytelling underpinning digital work in museums. Led by the University of Leicester and Southern University New Orleans (and supported by Harvard University and Johns Hopkins University), '3 by 3' is a unique research collaboration, bringing together the leading sector bodies in the UK and US: the American Alliance of Museums with the UK's Museums Association, and the Museum Computer Network (US) with the Museums Computer Group (UK). At the core of the project is a transatlantic partnership of cultural organisations, with digital leads across the Smithsonian Institution partnering with their counterparts in the Science Museum Group, Victoria and Albert Museum, Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales, and National Museums Scotland. Driving this practice-based research of '3 by 3', are '3' researchers following '3' key themes (on 'empathy', 'precarity', 'equity'), through a series of live interventions within the working environments of the partner museums. Real-world tests of new approaches to leading digital change. As well as producing a series of practitioner-facing resources, a new reflective podcast series for the sector, and the synthesis of its findings into a cohesive 'Framework for New Digital Leadership in Museums', '3 by 3' will also partner with its policy-making and industry collaborators (that include Arts Council England, the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Culture24) to produce a 'Sector White Paper', setting out the challenges and opportunities for UK and US organisations as they lead digital change (empathetically and equitably) in these times of individual and institutional precarity.