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Introduction:

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Welcome to the University Museums Group UK website

UMG UK represents the interests of university museums and their staff and is increasingly acting as an advocate and pressure group for the sector.

University museums and galleries are incredibly diverse, ranging from large high-profile 'high street' organisations to tiny departmental museums delivering excellent public learning programmes from challenging buildings buried deep within university campuses. Some are the principal museums in their region and, at a time when scholarship in most regional museums is being eroded by funding and strategic constraints, university museums offer an unparalleled knowledge and learning resource which is available both to academic researchers and to the general public.

• There are around a hundred university museums in the UK which are regularly accessible to the public, with a further three hundred or so additional collections used mainly for academic research and teaching.
  
  
• University museums in England comprise 4% of the UK museum sector, yet they are custodians of 30% of all the collections 'Designated' by DCMS as being of national or international importance. In Scotland, five university museums alone hold 13% of the country's similarly-rated collections.
  
  
• Thirty eight of the university museums and galleries in England and Scotland are supported by core-funding from HEFCE/SHEFC (distributed in England by the Arts and Humanities Research Board), and in 2002 these institutions alone attracted more than two million visits. Most university museums, however, receive very little in the way of reliable core-funding.

Our website is very new and was launched to coincide with the publication of a report, University Museums in the United Kingdom: a National Resource for the Twenty-first Century (Please click on 'Advocacy'). We will be adding news and information about the collections, work and achievements of our museums, and details of activities for UMG members.

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