Biography
A small group of museum professionals founded the world’s first museums association to foster mutual cooperation among curators and institutions. Our inaugural meeting was held at the Yorkshire Philosophical Society in York on 20 June 1889. It started out with just 11 members primarily from regional museums including Liverpool Museum, Stockport Museum, Sunderland Museum, Brighton Museum and Weston Park. The inaugural meeting was hosted by the Yorkshire Philosophical Society in York. The first Annual Conference was held in Liverpool and beyween 1912-65 some were held overseas, including Dublin, Paris, Amsterdam and Brussels. The first issue of the Museums Journal as published in 1901 with the strapline “the organ of the Museums Association”.
The Museums Association ensured that the Education Act of 1918 permitted local authorities to fund museum visits by schools in England and Wales, and to transfer museum powers to their education authorities.
From 1930 the MA began to run training courses and in 1935 created a formal Museum Diploma, with a syllabus featuring instruction in general museum work and more specialised branches of museum work, as well as many practical elements – including a dreaded final exam in which students were presented with a table of assorted objects to identify which informed the development of the UK’s first school of museum studies at the University of Leicester and the elements that make up other academic museum qualifications.
In the 1970s the MA set up the Information Retrieval Group, which later went on to become the Collections Trust.
