Due to the planned construction of a new wing at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, the museum management announced in October 2008 that the Caird Library would be shut for about the first half of 2009, with very limited opening for the subsequent three years. This brought a great many protests from readers of all varieties and in early December the museum’s management announced opening for two days per week, but without any access to manuscripts. That did not satisfy some individuals and we carried on with our various projects. Personally, among things I continued with my appeals to the civil servant at The National Archives charged with enforcing public access to publically deposited official documents (as per the Freedom of Information Act). Not being privy to the exchanges between the officials in Kew and Greenwich I do not know the precise details, but the museum’s management crumbled further just before Christmas 2008 and the NMM has subsequently complied with the law. However, this did not cover privately deposited collections of records and although there has been some access, no information on these collections was forthcoming from the NMM.

 

A Cabinet Office online petition was set up by a group that I became aware of through a contact, just before the museum’s second climb-down last December. While there were over 250 names by the time of its closure in March 2009, it would appear that little was attained by this. Perhaps real pressure could have been put on the museum’s management if the maritime academic fraternity had backed this. With a miniscule number of honourable exceptions, this crowd failed miserably though: utterly unresponsive to the numerous appeals made to them.  As could be expected, HMG’s response to the online petition was patronising and insulting.

 

Similarly, I spent over six months trying to form a ‘representative committee’ of the august maritime societies and other groups, such as freelance researchers and writers. My aim was to have a balanced group that might have negotiated with the NMM’s senior management in getting improvements to museum services for readers of all varieties. While I had support from fellow researchers and writers, virtually none was received from the academics. Taking months to cover aspects that should have taken days (last November when I first floated this idea), I finally gave up through the lack of competence (or apparent interest) by senior officials in the Society of Maritime Research. The extreme reticence to become involved shown by these academics I judge to be a mix of selfishness, laziness and sheer cowardice.

 

Anyway, with all the museum’s manuscripts off site, all manuscripts ordered are now subject to something not dissimilar to their past normal offsite ‘service’. For details on the current situation please go to the museum’s website at http://www.nmm.ac.uk/researchers/library/visiting/. If in the meantime the museum is not bankrupted (or fall into the pit to be dug for the new wing), this regime will remain in place until the opening of the Sammy Offer Wing. This is planned to be opened for the Olympics of 2012 - as those that follow sports are well known to be greatly interested in maritime matters!

 

Also, it may be that the size of the new onsite library and archive originally promised will be significantly reduced. Seemingly this is due to a new ‘interactive’ gallery to be built in space allocated to library and archive space.

 

 

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