Access and admission charges to museums: a case study

Abstract

The principle of free admission to national cultural institutions, especially museums, has prevailed in Britain and Ireland for over two centuries. Charges to the British Museum were proposed as far back as 1784, and again in 1929. Charges were actually introduced there in 1974, but abandoned three months later after a change of government. The pressure to introduce charges has resumed, especially now that charges have been introduced in the National History Museum in London and in many branches of other national museums in Britain as well as in several national museums in Continental Europe.Some fundamental questions concerning the nature and role of a national museum need addressing before the issue of admission charges can properly be addressed. With this in mind, Sections 2 and 3 of this paper will link back to the earlier work cited above and look again at some of the important questions raised therein. These relate to the functions of museums in general and what the raison d'etre of a national museum is and how it relates to these functions4. It will be seen in that discussion that a key objective of a national historical museum (which is what the National Museum in Ireland, the National Museum in Denmark and the British Museum in London are), and indeed of similar national institutions, is the achievement of a satisfactory level of access to the collections of the museum and a consideration of this issue forms the subject matter of the next two sections of the paper. In Section 4 it will be asked what is meant by a satisfactory level of access, while Section 5 will examine the available evidence in relation to access to the National Museum of Ireland. The question of charging for entry to the Museum is then fully discussed in Section 6, both in terms of the experience with charging for entry to similar institutions in Ireland to date and in terms of how, if at all, it would impact on the goal of access. Section 7 concludes the paper.