Could museums be more transparent? - Dr Eva Miller

By Dr Eva Miller, UCL History

In late June 2025, Manchester Museum announced that it was soliciting responses from visitors about whether the mummified body of an Egyptian woman, Asru, displayed almost continuously for 250 years, should remain on display. This reconsideration was part of a wider Decolonise! project at Manchester Museum. Visitors were asked to leave responses in postcards in the gallery, or online. 

When I first heard about this initiative, it was from a Guardian article, high up in the most-read on the day it appeared. This was no surprise: coverage of British museums reconsidering the status quo often gets high traffic. Endeavours like Manchester Museum’s Decolonise! have become fodder for culture war commentary, serving as proxies for larger anxieties about British identity, power, and history. Are British museums in thrall to the woke agenda? Or are they bastions of colonialism, irredeemably burdened by legacies of theft and exploitation, putting sticking plasters on gaping historical wounds?

While it may seem inevitable that museums can’t please everyone, it sometimes seems like they can’t please anyone. Too woke or not woke enough, imperial or radical, pandering or domineering: the same institutions will be accused of being all these things. Spare a thought, then, for the humble working museum curator, toiling under budgetary constraints (most UK museums are, to put it mildly, not exactly flush) and tasked with writing labels that please everyone, often in 80 words or less. 

I believe that understanding how museums work is an essential first step to understanding how they might work differently—and a topic that I think most museum visitors find legitimately interesting in itself. So I decided to ask my colleague, Nancy Highcock, curator for the Ancient Middle East galleries of the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, and a group of UCL and Oxford undergraduates in History, Archaeology, and Anthropology to explore the question of how museums could become ‘more transparent’ during two UCL IAS-sponsored workshops at the Ashmolean. 

‘Transparency’ is a useful concept because it carries an interesting range of implications: big, serious ethical questions about provenance, restitution, funding, and the right of institutions to hold and display artefacts (and, for that matter, human bodies) from other times and places. But ‘transparency’ is also about how clear and visible the daily work of the institution is. Museums are active spaces of discussion, disagreement, and dissent among staff and stakeholders. Gallery spaces are shaped by mundane concerns and legal regulations that audiences might not know about. What are the risks of displaying a fragile object? Does it matter if galleries across a large museum are consistent? Exactly how much of the collection is in storage, and what happens to it there? Who is allowed to change a lightbulb in a display case when it goes?

Over two workshops held in the Ashmolean Museum, we discussed the politics and practicalities of making, labelling, and sharing in museums. The Ancient Middle East galleries in the Ashmolean were recently redesigned, opening in 2019; understanding whether some novel strategies were resonating with audiences could inform how other Ashmolean galleries are reconfigured in future. The Ancient Middle East gallery now leads with an early acknowledgement of the role of colonial and imperial power in collecting from the region, prioritises excavated objects over purchased ones, and highlights concerns about unprovenanced objects obtained through the art market or donated by collectors.

In our workshops, we ultimately focused on one of the most basic aspects of museum curation: the humble label. A simple change to labels had proved one of the most controversial aspects of the Ancient Middle East gallery’s redesign: its labels no longer feature museum accession numbers, that jumble of letters and numbers that identify an object within a museum’s database. This decision had caused some consternation from academics and students who make up one constituency within the Ashmolean’s audience (a full list of objects with museum numbers can be accessed online, but most visitors miss the small note on the wall). Yet with space at a premium in tiny labels, leaving out that number allows slightly more room for interpretative text. Perhaps more importantly, it makes the entire label relevant and legible to visitors who don’t know how to search a museum database, or would never have a reason to do so. This might make what can be an intimidating space feel less alienating. 
 

For participants in our workshops, more information almost always seemed better. This particularly applied to information acknowledging problematic or difficult legacies in the collection. Given that few visitors want to read a wall of text in a space where they’ve come for an encounter with objects, one possibility we found compelling was using different kinds of labels to make the museum a ‘multivocal’ space. Participants liked the existing ‘Our Museum Our Voices’ labels in the Ashmolean Middle East gallery which featured the words of Muslim students at Queen Mary University. These labels bring out a different side of objects, and highlight their emotional resonance with living people today.  

 

Discussions during our workshops reminded us that people engage with museums in different ways and for different reasons, at different times. While the public has long held high trust in museums as authorities on knowledge, they are also run by people, like Nancy, who want to learn from their visitors. So fill out the Manchester Museum’s consultation if you have thoughts; one thing all workshop participants agreed on, more voices can only be a good thing.

The workshops ‘Can Students and Curators Build a More Transparent Museum?’ ran in May 2025 at the Ashmolean Museum, funded by a UCL IAS Octagon grant. They were convened by Eva Miller, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in History and İrem Nogay, doctoral student in Greek & Latin, with the invaluable support and guidance of Nancy Highcock, Jaleh Hearn Curator for the Ancient Near East at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. 
 

Image captions
 

Banner Image: Met Museum, New York

Image 1: A few words have a big impact in a short label: on the left note ‘unknown craftsperson(s)’, and ‘taken from its place of origin by unknown people’ in a label by Gardiana Bandeira Melo (BA Archaeology of Egypt and Sudan); on the right ‘carries the touch of a person who lived over 5000 years ago’ by Pooja Murugakannan (BSc Archaeology).

Image 2: An ‘Our Museum Our Voices’ label complements the label in the ‘institutional voice’. It is written in poetic languages and raises the notion of the value and meaning objects have for the living visitor who ‘speaks’ in the label. (Credit to Axel Horne for the photo).

Image 3: Mentimeter responses from participants in the workshops reminded us that museums can hit lots of different ways.