Mapping Museums Lab (MMLab)

Description

The Mapping Museums Lab is a research lab based at Birkbeck, University of London, and King's College London. Working across computer science, data science, geography and museum studies, the team collects, classifies, and analyses data on museums in the UK. Its purpose is to study the constitution and change within the museum sector, and to examine the history and purpose of museums.

The Mapping Museums Database is publicly available online. It brings together information about all museums in the UK since 1960. Users can search, visualise, and download information on:

• Museums open since 1960: their governance, location, size, subject matter, accreditation status, years of opening and closing, among other characteristics
• Changes within the museum sector since 1960
• Museums that have closed since 2000; reasons for closure and the main outcomes of closure (e.g. stored, transferred)
• Object disposal: what happened to objects from closed museums

The Mapping Museums Lab projects have included a history and geography of the UK's independent museum sector, a study of UK museums during the pandemic, and research on museum closure in the UK from 2000 to 2025.

Currently active

Yes

Offers funding

No, this infrastructure does not provide funding.

Founding year

2016

Contact details

On the map

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Categorisation

Type

Tags

University affiliation(s)

Birkbeck, University of London
London

Partner Infrastructures

Cultural Geo-Analytics Lab

The Cultural Geo-Analytics Lab is a research lab in the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London that uses geographic data science to study cultural institutions, cultural products an… read more about Cultural Geo-Analytics Lab

London

Partner Universities

King's College London (KCL)