Postai és Távközlési Múzeumi Alapítvány Évkönyve, 1998
Rövid tartalmi összefoglaló angol nyelven
Mrs Gergely Kovács Plan of Action for the Foundation of Postal and Telecommunications Museums in 1999 The Foundation is entering its tenth year and preparing to give an account of its ten years of activity. Central to its plan of action in the last year of the century is to follow up its extensive development in recent years with intensive work centred on its collections. This is in preparation for the new century, during the first decade of which the economic and social mobility that began in 1990 will extend to the deeper, nobler fields of culture. An increasingly prominent part in the work of museums will be played by the ‘utilization’ of the collections, by applied museum studies, and by exclusive exhibitions linked with specific events. The World Wide Web and computer data bases will play a kind of assessing role in the changes. Museums whose collection catalogues are placed on the Web, along with a list of items sought, will probably find them more easily than through auctions and antique dealers. As for the results to be obtained from the ‘symbolic assessment’ of the Web, we can already gain evidence by re-examining our card indexes of item descriptions and the objects in our collections. We can ‘scan’ them to see if they are worth placing on the ‘world stage’. Presenting data bases on the Web requires a director, just as staging of a play does. People suitable for this task emerge from the community of museum staff or become capable after extension training of making the synthesis and seeing beyond their narrow specialist field. The work of museum staff is only facilitated by these modem means if the inclusion in the data base is preceded by detailed scientific processing. This processing at the Postal Museum does not even reach a medium standard in many cases. The objective reasons behind this have included the very rapid expansion of the collections and the high number of permanent exhibitions (nine permanent displays opened in the provinces between 1990 and 1998) and ad hoc requests and tasks. Placing the work of collection at the centre of the activities in 1999 is essential, not just appropriate. The sections in the Foundation’s plan of action simply express the guidelines and basic tasks. It will be complemented in January 1999 by a detailed plan of action broken down by persons and into quarterly assignment plans. Management and administration • The efficiency of the management and administration work needs to be examined. • Sets of processing norms need to be devised to make collection work more intensive. • The post of warden needs to be instituted, into which the caretaker’s tasks will also be integrated. • Internal supervisory examinations and analyses need to be conducted. 261
